Christian Reif and Soprano Julia Bullock perform in the Grand Teton Music Festival's ‘Summer Nights’ program
Grand Teton Music Fest luxuriates under 'summer nights' with Bullock, Reif
By Richard Anderson
Jackson Hole News & Guide
July 19, 2023
Oh, summer days and summer nights: They were made for families to spread out in the grass, picnic basket overflowing with goodness, preferably with some live music playing nearby.
The Grand Teton Music Festival and its guests — soprano Julia Bullock and conductor Christian Reif — celebrate the season this weekend with a lushly romantic “Summer Nights” program featuring Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 1, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Ballade” and Hector Berlioz’s orchestral version of his expressive song cycle “Les nuits d’été.”
“It is very special for me to perform this for the first at the Grand Teton Music Festival,” said Bullock, who returns to the Tetons for the first time since her initial 2021 appearance, when she presented “Five Freedom Songs” by Jessie Montgomery. “It’s the piece that turned me on to classical music.”
Born in St. Louis in 1986, Bullock earned her bachelor’s degree at the Eastman School of Music, her master’s in Bard College’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program, and her Artist Diploma at New York’s Juilliard School, where she met her husband, Reif.
Since her first U.S. tour in 2014, she has served as artist in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, premiered works by Tania León, Courtney Bryan, Jessie Montgomery and Allison Loggins-Hull, and starred in the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’ production of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and the San Francisco Opera’s world premiere of John Adams’ “Girls of the Golden West.”
Her recording of “Doctor Atomic” with the BBC Symphony Orchestra led by Adams himself received a 2018 Grammy nomination for Best Opera Recording, and her 2014 recording of “West Side Story” with the San Francisco Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas was nominated for Best Musical Theater Album.
Written in 1841, Berlioz set six poems from his friend and neighbor Théophile Gautier’s collection “La comédie de la mort” for voice and piano, and later orchestrated them, which the writer said achieved a “Shakespearean depth of passion.”
Gautier does not explicitly evoke summer — indeed, the first poem Berlioz sets is about spring — but the song-cycle reflects the season’s languid atmosphere that lends itself to contemplating love and loss, fate and death, moonlight and dreams.
“Besides being sonically and vocally beautiful,” Bullock said of the work, “there’s this deep and wide-ranging emotional depth, even in something which seems as innocuous as thinking about the rose on someone’s lapel and giving that rose a voice. … It’s really gentle, deep poetry that talks about yearning and life and wanting to grasp every moment with those that you love.”
Of working with her husband, Reif, she said: “We value each other’s opinions. I seek him our as a critical ear, and he does the same. … Any time we can perform together, it’s something we try to prioritize when we can, just because we have such a good time. And obviously, living together, we can sit and talk about music, prepare material together.”
One of the things Bullock especially appreciates about Reif is that the time he takes to shape material is “sacred.”
Reif — resident conductor of the San Francisco Symphony and music director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra from 2016 to 2019, recently appointed chief conductor of the Gälve Symphony Orchestra of Sweden, and since 2022, music director for the Lakes Area Music Festival in Brainerd, Minnesota — opens his debut with GTMF with Coleridge-Taylor’s “Ballade” (1895).
Coleridge-Taylor was born out of wedlock in London in August 1875, the issue of Englishwoman Alice Hare Martin and Sierra Leone medical student Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor. With numerous musicians on his mother’s side, Coleridge-Taylor soon showed an aptitude for the art, and at the age of 15 began formal studies at the Royal College of Music. Composer Edward Elgar came to champion Coleridge-Taylor and secured a commission for him that resulted in his single-movement orchestral work “Ballade” — an exciting, changeable, colorful work of 11 or so minutes that shows off all of the orchestra’s tones and effects with great feeling and passion.
The weekend program will end with Schumann’s First Symphony (1841), known as his “Spring Symphony,” which concludes with its spritely fourth movement, and allegro animato that once bore the subtitle “Spring in Full Bloom.” Schumann was already well established as a composer and performer on the piano, with a reputation for memorable melodies and themes. His wife Clara Wieck Schumann encouraged him to put his musical mind to an orchestral work. As she wrote in her diary, “It would be best if he composed for orchestra; his imagination cannot find sufficient scope on the piano. … His compositions are all orchestral in feeling.”
His symphonic ventures started auspiciously enough with his Symphony No 1 in B flat major, which was premiered by none other than his friend Felix Mendelssohn, and was received by audiences with enthusiasm.
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