Praise by Gramophone Magazine for Julia Bullock’s album with Christian Reif

Julia Bullock: Walking in the Dark
By Pwyll ap Siôn
Gramophone

Julia Bullock may have decided to call the album Walking in the Dark but the soprano’s musical prowess, interpretative skills and creative vision shine as bright and clear as daylight on her illuminating debut release. In fact, Bullock states in the booklet notes that the dark can be a place of solace and comfort, a place ‘where we may find protection and safety’. That sense of security comes across in Bullock’s renditions of Sandy Denny’s “Who knows where the time goes?” and the Nina Simone-inspired “I wish I knew how it would feel to be free”.

Nevertheless, it’s most keenly sensed in Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915. James Agee’s stream-of-consciousness prose-poetry, which depicts a world seen through a child’s eyes, is captured vividly by Bullock. She imbues Barber’s undulating vocal lines with a warm, radiant glow but more importantly never loses sight of the gnawing nostalgia that tugs away at Agee’s text. Here is a world presented through the eyes of someone reflecting on his lost childhood, not living in it. Barber’s setting is of course brilliantly effective in communicating this sense of dislocation between past and present, but it requires someone of Bullock’s musical intelligence and understanding to really pull it off.

Darkness takes on a very different hue in the ‘Memorial de Tlatelolco’ from John Adams’s nativity oratorio for chorus and orchestra El Niño. Rosario Castellanos’s harrowing poem memorialises the massacre of civilians at the hands of Mexican state military and police in October 1968. Adams’s thunderous opening captures the violence of the moment with piercing, stabbing orchestral chords representing gunshot sounds, terror and blind panic.

Christian Reif and the Philharmonia Orchestra give a more direct and visceral account than the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under Kent Nagano (A/01). One senses that Bullock is right at the centre of the bloodbath rather than commenting from afar, as captured in her urgent delivery and breathlessness, such as during the moment that references the goddess Tlazoltéotl (the Devourer of Excrement).

Reif’s piano accompaniment provides excellent support for Bullock throughout the album’s song portions, especially in the traditional Spiritual “City Called Heaven”, and both succeed in uncovering a largely forgotten classic in American singer-songwriter Connie Converse’s ”One by One”, originally recorded in 1954.

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