Page 127 - Guildhall Coverage Book 2020-21

quarantining on arrival, so something of a Berlin Airlift in reverse is under way as concert
schedules are slowly replenished and some international talent jets in.

Not that Julia Bullock would put it that way. One of the most exciting singers of her generation,

blazing a trail not just as a soloist, but a programmer and activist, the 34-year-old American

soprano is — hurrah — based in Munich, where she lives with her German conductor husband.

The last live performances she gave pre-pandemic were of Britten’s song cycle Les

Illuminations, performed with the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. Neatly, her return to the UK is

for the same piece with the same conductor (but now with the Philharmonia orchestra) in a

streamed performance from the Southbank Centre, followed by two concerts, with crowds, at
Snape in Suffolk.

“I’m excited to perform,” she says via Zoom from her home in Munich. “But in thinking about

all the artists who are also really seeking work right now, I do have a little bit of tension

internally about coming to another country to work. But of course that’s how our business has
been run.”

And, it’s fair to say, Bullock isn’t all that impressed with how the business is run. “The
resources that are being used! How are they being used? How we were running things before ...

it’s becoming clear to me that it has maybe not been with full responsibility.”

The singer of Les Illuminations begins the cycle with Rimbaud’s enigmatic declaration, “I alone

have the key to the savage parade,” and then repeats the line twice. “The third time it is this
raging thing,” Bullock says, and as she chews over it we segue into her anger about how many

artistic organisations have failed artists and audiences this year.

She doesn’t want to go into specifics, but says she has been “not just frustrated, but deeply

hurt”. One firm conclusion is that this period has provided her with “space to consider ever more
carefully how I want to be spending my time — and not wasting any”.

She has not exactly dawdled yet in an unconventional but eye-catching career. “I’ve had the
privilege of being able to choose what I want to do and with whom I want to work. So I could