John Holiday
Equal Parts Baroque and R&B, John Holiday Is His Own Singer
Holiday, a countertenor, has forged a career that blends classical repertoire and his upbringing in church and pop music.
By Oussama Zahr
While driving to hear the countertenor John Holiday at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Va., I cued up a track from his coming album, “Over My Head”: “Strange Fruit,” the famous Billie Holiday song about lynching in the South. The voice that leaped out of the car speakers was high and clear, incantatory and sad. With its emotional directness and succulent, purring vibrato, it could have been a long-lost recording by Sarah Vaughan.
A bluesy, poetic lamentation of intergenerational trauma is a bold choice for an opera singer’s debut solo album, which would typically feature 19th-century art songs or classic arias. But John Holiday isn’t that kind of artist.
“I didn’t want to be a countertenor out there recording more Vivaldi, which I can do, or Handel, which I can do,” Holiday said in an interview. “I wanted it to be something that they’d never heard somebody like me sing.”
That statement could be Holiday’s artistic manifesto. His repertoire, just like his vocal quality, resists categorization and easy description.
Like most countertenors, Holiday’s classical repertoire leans heavily on Baroque and contemporary music, with performances this season of Handel’s “Messiah” with the New York Philharmonic in December and Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” with Los Angeles Opera starting in February.
Yet, this season, he also sang the Sorceress in Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” and Cherubino in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” roles typically performed by women. And in a true departure for classically trained countertenors, he appeared on the reality talent competition “The Voice” in 2020, making it all the way to the finals with songs by Frank Sinatra, Celine Dion and Beyoncé as a member of John Legend’s team.
“As soon as I left school, one of the things that I was discovering is that I wanted to be very true to who I was and who I am as a human being,” Holiday said. He earned degrees from Southern Methodist University, the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and the Juilliard School, where he sang the title role in Handel’s “Radamisto” in 2013. Even then, he displayed a liquidly feminine tone and an instinct for bravura. It seemed his intent in each aria was to determine his highest note in the key and figure out the fastest way to get there. He perked the opera right up.
For Holiday, being true to himself means weaving together the loose strands of opera, gospel, R&B, jazz and pop that make up his musical life and inheritance. “For a while, I felt like I couldn’t get people to really see me or hear me,” he said. “And I thought, I’m going to create my own thing, and that’s what I did.”