{"id":17762,"date":"2025-11-25T12:55:54","date_gmt":"2025-11-25T17:55:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/?p=17762"},"modified":"2026-02-23T12:59:22","modified_gmt":"2026-02-23T17:59:22","slug":"equal-parts-baroque-and-rb-john-holiday-is-his-own-singer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/equal-parts-baroque-and-rb-john-holiday-is-his-own-singer\/","title":{"rendered":"Equal Parts Baroque and R&B, John Holiday Is His Own Singer"},"content":{"rendered":"

From The New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n

Holiday, a countertenor, has forged a career that blends classical repertoire and his upbringing in church and pop music.<\/em><\/p>\n

By Oussama Zahr<\/p>\n

While driving to hear the countertenor John Holiday at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Va., I cued up a track from his coming album, \u201cOver My Head\u201d: \u201cStrange Fruit,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

A bluesy, poetic lamentation of intergenerational trauma is a bold choice for an opera singer\u2019s debut solo album, which would typically feature 19th-century art songs or classic arias. But John Holiday isn\u2019t that kind of artist.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t want to be a countertenor out there recording more Vivaldi, which I can do, or Handel, which I can do,\u201d Holiday said in an interview. \u201cI wanted it to be something that they\u2019d never heard somebody like me sing.\u201d<\/p>\n

That statement could be Holiday\u2019s artistic manifesto. His repertoire, just like his vocal quality, resists categorization and easy description.<\/p>\n

Like most countertenors, Holiday\u2019s classical repertoire leans heavily on Baroque and contemporary music, with performances this season of Handel\u2019s \u201cMessiah\u201d with the New York Philharmonic in December and Philip Glass\u2019s \u201cAkhnaten\u201d with Los Angeles Opera starting in February.<\/p>\n

Yet, this season, he also sang the Sorceress in Purcell\u2019s \u201cDido and Aeneas\u201d and Cherubino in Mozart\u2019s \u201cLe Nozze di Figaro,\u201d roles typically performed by women. And in a true departure for classically trained countertenors, he appeared on the reality talent competition \u201cThe Voice\u201d in 2020, making it all the way to the finals with songs by Frank Sinatra, Celine Dion and Beyonc\u00e9 as a member of John Legend\u2019s team.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs 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,\u201d 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\u2019s \u201cRadamisto\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cFor a while, I felt like I couldn\u2019t get people to really see me or hear me,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I thought, I\u2019m going to create my own thing, and that\u2019s what I did.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read the full profile.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From The New York Times 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, \u201cOver My Head\u201d: \u201cStrange Fruit,\u201d … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13503,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[7297,7298,4195,4439],"class_list":["post-17762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-countertenor","tag-john-holiday","tag-profile","tag-singer"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17762"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17763,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17762\/revisions\/17763"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/13503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}