“The commission was followed by Jessie Montgomery’s “Five Freedom Songs,” an orchestral song cycle built on the stirring texts of five traditional Black spirituals, each of them in different ways carrying forward a memory of suffering, a yearning for freedom, and a quietly thundering moral indictment of slavery. Montgomery has given these texts completely fresh musical treatments, and while the songs vary stylistically they are united by the lapidary clarity of her text setting and the powerful empathy of her own musical voice. On Sunday, soprano Julia Bullock, in her Tanglewood debut, rendered them with a beautiful combination of directness, expressive honesty, and poetic restraint. This cycle should be performed far and wide.”