Review: DiDonato Brings Dickinson Poems to Life through Brilliant Song Cycle by Puts at Carnegie

Though only a handful of Emily Dickinson’s hundreds of poems were published during her lifetime (more than 1700 others were found posthumously), she is best known as a risk-taking writer whose work straddled the line between the straightforward and the more abstract.

In addition, she has long been an inspiration to composers who clearly found the music in her work. The most recent of these was heard at Carnegie Hall late last week in the local premiere of EMILY—NO PRISONER BE, a song cycle by Kevin Puts that looks long and deep into the eyes of the poet.

Thrillingly performed by mezzo Joyce DiDonato and the string trio Time for Three (TF3), who also added their own vocals to the mix, it was a bold, exciting evening that combine some of the poet’s better known works with less familiar pieces. It had the audience stomping its feet, laughing at its lighter moments (eg, the “Bee Scherzos”) and cheering by the time the evening was over.

From the very first song, which appears to have been Puts’s jumping off spot, “They shut me up in Prose” (somehow summing up Dickinson’s escape from society's expectations) to “I dwell in possibilities” (featuring a soaring DiDonato) through to “No Prisoner Be” (a very short piece that ended the program with an audience singalong), Puts did stunning work.

It was intense and dramatic, energetic and thoughtful--and as dreamy as the room that she worked in. Even when I felt that parts of the staging might have been overdone, or that the evening might have run too long, I was never less than engrossed as witness to this strong and vital contemporary work.

Puts clearly found kindred spirits in his musical collaborators: DiDonato had been extraordinary as Virginia Woolf at the Met in his eponymous opera (with Greg Pierce) based on Michael Cunningham’s THE HOURS. She was also in grand voice from the moment she opened her mouth to sing. During COVID, Puts wrote a triple concerto for the exciting musicians of TF3 (Nicolas Kendall, Charles Yang and Ranaan Meyer) called “Contact,” which has been recorded by the Philadelphia Orchestra.

“I had a strong feeling the deep musical intuition, larger-than-life personalities, and fiercely creative minds of all four of these powerhouse artists might gel in a very special way,” he wrote in the program. “I wasn’t wrong.” The combination of the trio with DiDonato was superlative, as if they had been performing together all their lives.

As the composer also wrote in the program notes, EMILY—NO PRISONER was not “your grandmother’s Emily Dickinson.” Yes, indeed.

Caption: Mezzo Joyce DiDonato (in white) and Time for Three's Charles Yang (violin), Ranaan Meyer (bass) and, not shown, Nicolas Kendall (violin) 

Credit: Chris Lee