Signature Recital Series

With a “heroically shining tone of exceptional clarity and precision” (Opera magazine) and “gorgeously burnished power” (New York Times), American tenor Russell Thomas uses his signature elegance and intensity to create vivid character portrayals on the world’s most important stages.

His engagements for the 2021/22 season include his return to LA Opera as Radames in Aida, Florestan in Fidelio with San Francisco Opera, Cavaradossi in Tosca with Cincinnati Opera, Don Alvaro in La Forza del Destino at the Deutsche Oper Berlin and the title role of Otello at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Appearances in the 2022/23 season will include the title role of Ernani with Lyric Opera of Chicago and Calaf in Turandot with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

He opened the truncated 2019/20 season with his role debut as Don Alvaro in a new production of La forza del destino at Deutsche Oper Berlin, and subsequently made his role and house debuts as Radames in Houston Grand Opera’s new production of Aida. He also returned to Washington National Opera as the title character in Otello. On the concert stage, he joined Gianandrea Noseda at the Vienna Konzerthaus for Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9.  (Engagements cancelled due to the pandemic included leading roles at the Metropolitan Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera and Canadian Opera Company.)

The 2018/19 season featured Mr. Thomas’s hotly anticipated stage debut in Verdi’s iconic Otello, seen at the Canadian Opera Company after concert performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. He sang Manrico in Il Trovatore at the Bavarian State Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago, made his role debut as Roberto Devereux at San Francisco Opera, and brought his celebrated Titus in The Clemency of Titus to LA Opera. On the concert stage, he joined the World Orchestra for Peace in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 at the BBC Proms, and performed Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. He closed his season by reuniting with conductor Teodor Currentzis and director Peter Sellars for a new Idomeneo at the Salzburger Festspiele.

Susan Graham – hailed as “an artist to treasure” by the New York Times – rose to the highest echelon of international performers within just a few years of her professional debut, mastering an astonishing range of repertoire and genres along the way. Her operatic roles span four centuries, from Monteverdi’s Poppea to Sister Helen Prejean in Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, which was written especially for her. A familiar face at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, she also maintains a strong international presence at such key venues as Paris’s Théâtre du Châtelet, Santa Fe Opera and the Hollywood Bowl. She won a Grammy Award for her collection of Ives songs, and has also been recognized throughout her career as one of the foremost exponents of French vocal music. Although a native of Texas, she was awarded the French government’s prestigious “Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur,” both for her popularity as a performer in France and in honor of her commitment to French music.

Engagements for the truncated 2019/20 season included her celebrated portrayal of Mrs. Patrick De Rocher, mother of the convicted murderer, in Lyric Opera of Chicago’s company premiere of Dead Man Walking. She also starred as Madeline Mitchell in Jake Heggie's Three Decembers with Opera San José. In concert, she sang excerpts from Les Troyens with Donald Runnicles and the orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin at the Berlin Musikfest.

For the 2018/19 season, Graham joined Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony for Mahler’s Third Symphony at London’s BBC Proms and in Berlin, Leipzig, Vienna, Lucerne, and Paris. She made her role debut as Humperdinck’s Witch in Hansel and Gretel at LA Opera, hosted “An Evening with Susan Graham” at Dallas’s Meyerson Symphony Center, sang Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne with David Robertson and the Sydney Symphony, headlined the Mayshad Foundation’s season-closing gala concert in Marrakech, and returned to Carnegie Hall, first with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and then with Alec Baldwin and Leonard Slatkin for the Manhattan School of Music’s Centennial Gala Concert. To mark the 150th anniversary of Berlioz’s death, she performed Les nuits d’été with the Houston Symphony and made her New Zealand debut in La mort de Cléopâtre with the New Zealand Symphony under Edo de Waart. Other highlights of recent seasons include starring in Trouble in Tahiti at Lyric Opera of Chicago to honor the Bernstein Centennial, making her title role debut opposite James Morris in Marc Blitzstein’s 1948 opera Regina at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and appearing alongside Anna Netrebko, Renée Fleming and a host of other luminaries to celebrate the Metropolitan Opera’s five decades at its Lincoln Center home.

Graham’s earliest operatic successes were in such trouser roles as Cherubino in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. Her technical expertise soon brought mastery of Mozart’s more virtuosic roles, like Sesto in La clemenza di Tito, Idamante in Idomeneo and Cecilio in Lucio Silla, as well as the title roles of Handel’s Ariodante and Xerxes. She went on to triumph in two iconic Richard Strauss mezzo roles, Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier and the Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos. These brought her to prominence on all the world’s major opera stages, including the Met, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, Covent Garden, Paris Opera, La Scala, Bavarian State Opera, Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival, among many others. In addition to creating the role of Sister Helen Prejean at San Francisco Opera, she starred in Washington National Opera’s recent revival of Dead Man Walking, making her triumphant role debut as the convict’s mother. She also sang the leading ladies in the Met’s world premieres of John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby and Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy, and made her Dallas Opera debut as Tina in a new production of The Aspern Papers by Dominick Argento. As Houston Grand Opera’s Lynn Wyatt Great Artist, she starred as Prince Orlofsky in the company’s first staging of Die Fledermaus in 30 years, before heading an all-star cast as Sycorax in the Met’s Baroque pastiche The Enchanted Island and making her rapturously received musical theater debut in a new production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The King and I at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.

It was in an early Lyon production of Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict that Graham scored particular raves from the international press, and a triumph in the title role of Massenet’s Chérubin at Covent Garden sealed her operatic stardom. Further invitations to collaborate on French music were forthcoming from many of its preeminent conductors, including Sir Colin Davis, Charles Dutoit, James Levine and Seiji Ozawa. New productions of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust and Massenet’s Werther were mounted for the mezzo in New York, London, Paris, Chicago, San Francisco and beyond. More recently, she made title role debuts in Offenbach’s comic masterpieces La belle Hélène and The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein at Santa Fe Opera, as well as proving herself the standout star of the Met’s star-studded revival of Les Troyens, which was broadcast live to cinema audiences worldwide in the company’s celebrated “Live in HD” series. Graham’s affinity for French repertoire has not been limited to the opera stage, also serving as the foundation for her extensive concert and recital career. Such great cantatas and symphonic song cycles as Berlioz’s La mort de Cléopâtre and Les nuits d’été, Ravel’s Shéhérazade and Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer provide opportunities for collaborations with the world’s leading orchestras, and she makes regular appearances with the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Orchestre de Paris and London Symphony Orchestra.

Graham recently expanded her distinguished discography with Nonesuch Records’ DVD/Blu-ray release of William Kentridge’s new treatment of Berg’s Lulu, which captures her celebrated role debut as Countess Geschwitz at the Met. She has also recorded all the works described above, as well as appearing on a series of lauded solo albums, including Virgins, Vixens & Viragos on the Onyx label, featuring songs and arias by composers from Purcell to Sondheim; Un frisson français, a program of French song recorded with pianist Malcolm Martineau, also for Onyx; C’est ça la vie, c’est ça l’amour!, an album of 20th-century operetta rarities on Erato; and La Belle Époque, an award-winning collection of songs by Reynaldo Hahn with pianist Roger Vignoles, from Sony Classical. Among the mezzo’s numerous honors are Musical America’s Vocalist of the Year and an Opera News Award, while Gramophone magazine has dubbed her “America’s favorite mezzo.”

Learn more at SusanGraham.com.

Soprano Christine Goerke has appeared in the major opera houses of the world including the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Washington National Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Seattle Opera, Opera Company of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh Opera, New York City Opera, Glimmerglass Opera, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Paris Opera, Théâtre du Châtelet, Théâtre du Capitole in Toulouse, Deutsche Oper Berlin, La Scala, Maggio Musical Fiorentino, Teatro Real in Madrid, Teatro Municipal de Santiago, and the Saito Kinen Festival. She has sung much of the great soprano repertoire, starting with the Mozart and Handel heroines and now earning critical acclaim for the dramatic Strauss and Wagner roles. She has received praise for her portrayals of the title roles in Elektra, Turandot and Ariadne auf Naxos, Brünnhilde in the Ring cycle, Kundry in Parsifal, Ortrud in Lohengrin, Leonora in Fidelio, Eboli in Don Carlos, the Dyer's Wife in Die Frau ohne Schatten, Cassandre in Les Troyens, Ellen Orford in Peter Grimes, Female Chorus in The Rape of Lucretia, Alice in Falstaff and Madame Lidoine in Dialogues des Carmelites.

In 2021, she was named the new associate artistic director of Michigan Opera Theatre, a three-year appointment.

Ms. Goerke has appeared with a number of the leading orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra (in Boston, Carnegie Hall, and the Tanglewood Festival), Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Radio Vara (at the Concertgebouw), Sydney Symphony, New Zealand Symphony, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the BBC Proms, and the Hallé Orchestra at the Edinburgh International Festival. She has worked with some of the world's foremost conductors including James Conlon, Sir Andrew Davies, Sir Mark Elder, Christoph Eschenbach, Claus Peter Flor, James Levine, Sir Charles Mackerras, Kurt Masur, Zubin Mehta, Andris Nelsons, Seiji Ozawa, David Robertson, Donald Runnicles, Esa-Pekka Salonen, the late Robert Shaw, Patrick Summers, Jeffery Tate, Christian Thielemann, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Edo de Waart.

Ms. Goerke's recording of Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony with Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra won the 2003 Grammy Award for Best Classical Recording and Best Choral Performance. Her close association with Robert Shaw yielded several recordings including Brahms' Liebeslieder Waltzes, Poulenc's Stabat Mater, Szymanowski's Stabat Mater and the Grammy-nominated recording of Dvorak's Stabat Mater. Other recordings include the title role in Iphigenie en Tauride for Telarc and Britten’s War Requiem, which won the 1999 Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance.

Due to the ongoing worldwide pandemic, the majority of Ms. Goerke’s 2020/21 season engagements were unfortunately cancelled. However, in the fall of 2020 she starred in the Michigan Opera Theater’s critically acclaimed production of Twilight: Gods, an innovative staging of Götterdämmerung and also served as the host of the Metropolitan Opera’s Recital Series throughout the season.

Ms. Goerke was the recipient of the 2001 Richard Tucker Award, the 2015 Musical America Vocalist of the Year Award, and the 2017 Opera News Award.

Learn more at ChristineGoerke.com.

January 2021

American classical singer Julia Bullock is “a musician who delights in making her own rules” (New Yorker). Combining versatile artistry with a probing intellect and commanding stage presence, she has, in her early 30s, already headlined productions and concerts at some of the preeminent arts institutions worldwide. An innovative programmer whose artistic curation is in high demand, her curatorial positions include collaborative partner of Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2020/21, his inaugural season as music director of the San Francisco Symphony; 2019/20 Artist in Residence of the same orchestra; Artist in Residence of London’s Guildhall School for the 2020-2022 seasons; opera-programming host of new broadcast channel All Arts; founding core member of the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC); and 2018/19 Artist in Residence of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Chosen as a 2021 “Artist of the Year” by Musical America, which hailed her as an “agent of change,” Bullock is also a prominent voice of social consciousness. As Vanity Fair notes, she is “young, highly successful, [and] politically engaged,” with the “ability to inject each note she sings with a sense of grace and urgency, lending her performances the feel of being both of the moment and incredibly timeless.”

As Artist in Residence of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bullock curated five thought-provoking programs in some of the museum’s most iconic spaces: “History’s Persistent Voice,” which combined traditional slave songs with new music by American women of color, including the world premieres of new Met commissions from Tania León, Courtney Bryan, Jessie Montgomery and Allison Loggins-Hull; a program of Langston Hughes poetry and settings, featuring New York Philharmonic principal clarinetist Anthony McGill, the Young People’s Chorus of New York, and American composers and vocalists; a new chamber arrangement of John Adams’s Christmas oratorio El Niño at the Cloisters; AMOC’s account of Hans Werner Henze’s El Cimarrón (“The Runaway Slave”); and, marking the first full-length performance on the museum’s grand staircase, Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine, the musical portrait of Josephine Baker that was conceived by Bullock in collaboration with Peter Sellars and written for her by MacArthur “Genius” Fellows Tyshawn Sorey and Claudia Rankine. The residency crowned a banner 2018/19 season for Bullock. She took part in the world premiere of Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and reprised Dame Shirley, the leading role she created in Adams’s Girls of the Golden West, for the opera’s European premiere at Dutch National Opera. She also gave the Boston premiere of Perle Noire at Harvard’s OBERON, made her Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra debut in Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, and gave a North American recital tour with her frequent piano partner, John Arida.

Bullock recently made several key operatic debuts: at San Francisco Opera in the world premiere of Girls of the Golden West, at Santa Fe Opera as Kitty Oppenheimer in Adams’s Doctor Atomic, at Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and Dutch National Opera as Anne Truelove in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, and at the English National Opera, Spain’s Teatro Real, and Russia’s Perm Opera House and Bolshoi Theatre in the title role of Purcell’s The Indian Queen. Her wide-ranging repertoire also encompasses the title roles of Massenet’s Cendrillon, Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges and Janaček’s The Cunning Little Vixen; Monica in Menotti’s The Medium; Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro; and Pamina in The Magic Flute, which she sang on tour in South America under the direction of Peter Brook and in concert with Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Bullock reunited with Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2019, for season-opening performances of Barber’s Knoxville. The collaboration was just one of her important recent orchestral engagements. As part of her 2019/20 residency with the San Francisco Symphony, she joined the orchestra under Music Director Designate Salonen for a pairing of Ravel’s Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé with Britten’s Les Illuminations. The English composer’s song cycle was also the vehicle for debuts with the symphonies of Milwaukee and Indianapolis, where she performed under the baton of Marc Albrecht. Under Andris Nelsons’s leadership, she headlined the Bernstein centennial gala that launched the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2017/18 season, and Bernstein’s music also saw her make debuts with the San Francisco Symphony, led by Michael Tilson Thomas; at the Hollywood Bowl, with Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic; with Japan’s NHK Symphony under Paavo Järvi; and with the New York Philharmonic, in open-air concerts under Alan Gilbert’s direction in Vail, Santa Barbara and multiple New York City parks. At the invitation of Sir Simon Rattle, she made debuts with both the Berlin Philharmonic Academy, in Kaija Saariaho’s La passion de Simone, and the London Symphony Orchestra, in Maurice Délage’s song cycle Quatre poèmes hindous. Her other concert highlights include performing Adams’s El Niño with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

In 2014, Bullock gave her first U.S. recital tour, capped by her debut at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Since then, she has maintained a thriving solo career. In 2019, she joined pianist Cédric Tiberghien under Katie Mitchell’s direction for the American, British, Belgian and Russian premieres of Zauberland (“Magic Land”), a new work juxtaposing Schumann’s Dichterliebe with original songs by Bernard Foccroulle and Martin Crimp. This followed the high-profile North American recital tour Bullock gave in 2018, which featured masterclasses and local school performances in each city, with dates at New York’s Carnegie Hall, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Cal Performances at UC Berkeley and Boston’s Celebrity Series. Other solo performance highlights include her 2017 Disney Hall debut and appearances at the 2016 Mostly Mozart and Ojai Music festivals, where she collaborated with Roomful of Teeth and the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) on Peter Sellars’s new staging of La passion de Simone and on the world premiere of Josephine Baker: A Portrait, the original prototype for Perle Noire.

Bullock’s growing discography already comprises a number of distinguished recordings. Her account of Quatre poèmes hindous with Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra was captured live on DVD, as was her title role appearance in Sellars’s production of The Indian Queen for Sony Classical. Selected as one of the New York Times’s “25 Best Musical Tracks of 2018,” her starring role in Adams’s Doctor Atomic, recorded with the composer conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra, was a nominee for the 2018 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording. This marked Bullock’s second appearance on a Grammy-nominated recording, following her live account of West Side Story with Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, a nominee for Best Musical Theater Album in 2014.

Her other honors include the 2016 Sphinx Medal of Excellence, a 2015 Leonore Annenberg Arts Fellowship, the 2015 Richard F. Gold Grant from the Shoshana Foundation, Lincoln Center’s 2015 Martin E. Segal Award, First Prize at the 2014 Naumburg International Vocal Competition and First Prize at the 2012 Young Concert Artists International Auditions. She was chosen as one of WQXR’s “19 for 19” artists to watch in 2019; among the “Best Classical Music of 2018” by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and Philadelphia Inquirer; as one of Opera News’s “18 to Watch in 2018-19”; and among the New York Times’s “Best Classical Music of 2016.” In November 2020, during the pandemic, Bullock recorded a “Tiny Desk (Home) Concert” for NPR Music’s special quarantine edition of the series; NPR’s Tom Huizenga found it “among the most transcendent musical moments I’ve experienced this year.”

Bullock’s political engagement is informed by her own mixed heritage, and she is committed to integrating community involvement with her musical life. High in demand as a speaker in panels on diversity, equity and inclusion in the arts, Bullock has taken part in livestreamed conversations presented by Music Academy of the West, Long Beach Opera, LA Opera and other organizations. As well as trying to engage with local communities in each city she visits, she serves on the advisory board of Turn The Spotlight, a foundation designed to empower women and people of color, both on stage and behind the scenes, to make a more equitable future in the arts. She has also organized and participated in benefit concerts for the FSH Society, which funds research for muscular dystrophy; the Medicine Initiative for New York’s Weill Medical Center; and the Shropshire Music Foundation, a nonprofit serving war-affected children and adolescents through music education and performance programs in Northern Ireland, Kosovo and Uganda.

Julia Bullock was born in St. Louis, Missouri, where she joined the artist-in-training program at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis while in high school. She went on to earn her bachelor’s degree at the Eastman School of Music, her master’s degree in Bard College’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program, and her artist diploma at New York’s Juilliard School. It was there that she first met her husband, conductor Christian Reif, with whom she now lives in Munich.

Learn more at JuliaBullock.com.

 American mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges, known for her “plush-voiced mezzo-soprano” (New York Times), has been heralded as “a rising star” (Los Angeles Times), gracing the world’s top opera and concert stages.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the cancellation of Ms. Bridges’ engagements in the title role of Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera and Canadian Opera Company, she has emerged at this unique moment as a leading figure in classical music’s shift toward conversations of inclusion and racial justice in the performing arts. Bridges led a highly successful panel on race and inequality in opera with LA Opera that drew international acclaim for being a “conversation of striking scope and candor” (New York Times). Bridges also performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel for two episodes of the digital SOUND/STAGE series. Upcoming highlights of Bridges’s 2020/21 season include her role debut as Giovanna Seymour in Anna Bolena at Dutch National Opera.

Highlights from her 2019/20 season included her highly-acclaimed debut at the Metropolitan Opera as Nefertiti in a sold-out run of Philip Glass’ opera Akhnaten, as well as a house and role debut with Washington National Opera as Dalila in Samson et Dalila. Bridges was also originally scheduled to sing the title role of Carmen at Dutch National Opera and was scheduled to make her debut with the Festival d’Aix-en-provence singing Margret in a new production of Wozzeck, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, which were unfortunately cancelled due to the pandemic.

Other recent career highlights include her sold-out Carnegie Hall Recital debut, her role debut of Kasturbai in Satyagraha at LA Opera, her Los Angeles Master Chorale debut, and her debuts at Dutch National Opera and the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. In addition, Ms. Bridges made her role debut as Carmen at the San Francisco Opera, creating the role of Josefa Segovia in the world premiere of John Adams’ Girls of the Golden West at San Francisco Opera, her debut as Preziosilla in La Forza del Destino with Opernhaus Zürich, and performances as Carmen in the world premiere of Bel Canto, an opera by Jimmy Lopez, based on the novel by Ann Patchett at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Bridges is a recipient of the prestigious 2018 Sphinx Medal of Excellence Award, a 2016 Richard Tucker Career Grant, first prize winner at the 2016 Francisco Viñas International Competition, first prize winner at the 2015 Gerda Lissner Competition, a recipient of the 2013 Sullivan Foundation Award, a 2012 Marian Anderson award winner, the recipient of the 2011 Sara Tucker Study Grant, the recipient of the 2009 Richard F. Gold Grant from the Shoshana Foundation, and the winner of the 2008 Leontyne Price Foundation Competition. J’Nai completed a three-year residency with the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center at Lyric Opera of Chicago, represented the United States at the prestigious BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition and was a Young Artist at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, New York.

A native of Tacoma, Washington, she earned her master of music degree from Curtis Institute of Music, and her bachelor of music degree in vocal performance from the Manhattan School of Music.

Learn more at JNaiBridgesMezzo.com.