Perhaps a Carnegie Hall archivist has recorded how often an evening-long work of brand-new chamber music, performed in the big auditorium, has prompted a standing ovation, but I would guess almost never. I was afraid that Kevin Puts’s Emily — No Prisoner Be, for mezzo-soprano and string trio, would get swallowed up in the hall’s expanse. The sight of microphones increased my skepticism, because amplification can only help so much if the music is too small or the space too big. I didn’t need to worry: As soon as the first notes sounded, it became clear that Emily is both intimate and symphonic. And mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, the star whose name alone was enough to fill the house on February 19, skipped back and forth across that expressive chasm with ease, accompanied by the string trio Time for Three.
Puts’s cycle of two dozen Emily Dickinson songs, plus a couple of interludes, begins with “They Shut me Up in Prose,” a poem whose first four words evoke rage and resistance against a darkly tyrannical force.
They shut me up in Prose —
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet —
Because they liked me “still” —
Stillness is imprisonment, but confinement is pointless against the immense, liberating force of Dickinson’s poetic mind. She has only to think it, and, “easy as a Star,” she can “look down upon Captivity — And laugh.” It’s a powerful statement of intellectual and artistic freedom, and Puts prepares it with a furious trembling of strings, like the buzzing bees that populate other Dickinson poems. DiDonato enters with a pop-song-worthy hook, and the players double as vocalists, surrounding the tune with a halo of close harmony. But it takes less than a minute for her voice, like the poet’s restless mind, to take flight and spin off into the heavens.
The second song is an introvert’s anthem, “I Was the Slightest in the House,” and Puts sets it as a hushed reflection, almost a diary entry in musical form. DiDonato has one of the opera world’s great murmurs, a soft, warm filament of sound that stays perfectly clear down to the lowest reach of her register and the quietest pianissimo until it simply disappears. When this diva with a big personality, who makes her living lobbing arias to the upper balconies of an overscale opera house, utters the words “ I could not bear to live—aloud— / The Racket shamed me so—” you believe without hesitation that she is a lover of quietude.
Those first two numbers stake out the territory for the rest of the work, which lasts about 75 minutes and lingers on many shades of human experience and musical reference: the Straussian exuberance of “I Dwell in Possibility,” the ravishing depressiveness of “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain,” the Sondheimian wryness of (and millinery references) of “I Tie My Hat – I Crease My Shawl.” That makes Emily sound like a derivative pastiche, though, and it’s not, because Puts’s prosody and melodic gift both keep it fresh.
He has a knack for translating Dickinson’s rhythms into music. Her mixture of plain New England speech and jerky hesitations, of the vernacular and the gnomic, have made her abidingly popular with American composers, who have churned out thousands of settings. But those qualities rarely fit a composer’s style as well as they do Puts’s. His score slips back and forth between hymnlike simplicity and operatic virtuosity. It feels like you could learn to sing along, but you almost certainly can’t.
If Dickinson has a fine collaborator in Puts, the composer has equal affinity with the performers. He wrote the role of Virginia Woolf in his opera The Hours for DiDonato, and the triple concerto Contact for Time for Three. Inevitably, their strengths and quirks seeped into the composer’s head so that the musicians helped shape the score instead of just carrying out its instructions.
The director, Andrew Staples, placed the performers on a stage within a stage, a stylized version of Dickinson’s bedroom in Amherst, Massachusetts with sheer curtains billowing and lighting that traces the bright and darkling recesses of the soul. The production works, mostly because DiDonato and Time for Three all know how to use it, moving without awkwardness, bringing the audience closer to the music instead of creating a distracting barrier. For an encore, DiDonato conscripted the audience into singing the lilting refrain of the final song, “No Prisoner Be,” while the musicians gradually fell silent. This is your music, now, she was saying: Cherish it.
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