Ravinia 2021 - Issue 1

“There’s clearly a lot of pain and frustration and passion and rage in [Janis Joplin’s] singing. The power of her delivery of a song—that is something I certainly learned from.” When she was young, Bullock’s father introduced her to recordings of Régine Crespin, the esteemed French soprano of the mid-20th century. Cre- spin heads a list of Bullock’s favorite classical artists, a lineup that includes Frederica von Stade, Kiri Te Kanawa, Shirley Verrett, and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. “I feel their voices with me all the time,” she said, “but the thing that’s intrinsic about them is their interpretive ability and the inimitable sounds they make.” The sound of Bullock’s voice—rich and warm with a smoky undercurrent and glints of steel—is also inimitable. She could easily spend her career trav- eling the world singing standard oper- atic repertoire. Since graduating from Juilliard in 2015, however, she has put her voice in service to programs that go far beyond the classical repertoire’s usual boundaries. “It’s good to be passionate about your work, but your profession should not be a vanity project,” she said in a profile accompanying her award as a 2021 Musical America magazine Artist of the Year: Agent of Change. She has kept in mind advice her mother of- fered as she started her career: “Make sure your work is making a difference for the betterment of the world.” Music by Black composers and art- ists, including blues and slave songs, have long been part of Bullock’s recital programs. Several years before her Metropolitan Museum residency in 2018–19, she was experimenting with an evening-length piece built around Josephine Baker, the legendary Black American singer and dancer whose witty and risqué performances in the music halls of Paris in the 1920s brought her worldwide fame. Baker, who died in 1975, was an agent for the French Resistance during World War II and also a high-profile civil rights activist. Bullock performed Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine , with music by Tyshawn Sorey and spoken monologues by poet Claudia Rankine, on the museum’s grand staircase in January 2019. The New York Times called it “a darkly captivating show offering a haunting investigation into the psychological shadows and public constructions” that shaped Baker’s career. Among the other programs Bullock curated for her Met residen- cy were new versions of traditional slave songs, commissions from Black composers, a focus on poet Langston Hughes, and a performance of El Ci- marrón , an oratorio about a runaway slave by Hans Werner Henze. The mood will be lighter but prob- ably no less compelling when Bullock comes onstage at Ravinia for the fourth movement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. Drawn from a collection of German folk poems, Mahler’s text is a mostly merry description of saints enjoying the good life in heaven. They dance and sing, drink wine, and enjoy RAVINIA.ORG • RAVINIA MAGAZINE 31