Kevin Puts hopes ‘Emily – No Prisoner Be’ will lead to future collaborations

None of the works of Kevin Puts have been performed more frequently in recent years than Contact, a triple concerto that the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer finished in 2022 for Time for Three, an unconventional, genre-blurring ensemble with two violins and bass. 

The pandemic-delayed work was commissioned by a consortium of six orchestras, including the Florida Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony and Spokane Symphony of Washington, and it has been showcased by a variety of other orchestras, as well as being performed all over the world.

Given the success of the project, including a recording that won a 2023 Grammy Award for best contemporary classical composition, Puts was eager for a follow-up: “I said, ‘What’s next?’ What can we find to do together?”

The result is Emily – No Prisoner Be, a 26-movement song cycle that Time for Three and famed mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato will present Feb. 10 in an SCP Chamber Music series concert.

It consists of 24 settings of poems by Emily Dickinson (inset photo, below), the celebrated 19th-century American poet (whose nearly 1,800 poems were not published as a complete set until 1955) and two instrumental interludes.

Time for Three and DiDonato’s semi-staged realization of the 65- to 70-minute work, with direction, light design and sound design by Andrew Staples, received its world premiere in August at the Bregenzer Festspiele, a music, opera and theater festival held each summer in Austria. A recording is set to be released Jan. 30 on the Platoon label.

The Symphony Center Presents performance is part of an American tour of the work that opens Feb. 1 at Weill Hall of the Green Music Center in Sonoma, California, and concludes Feb. 22 at Princeton University in New Jersey, with a stop at New York’s Carnegie Hall on Feb. 19.

Emily – No Prisoner Be is one of three Symphony Center programs that DiDonato is performing in 2025/26 as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Artist-in-Residence. “Emily is a project I firmly believe will immediately and deeply resonate with people,” she said. “So I can’t imagine not bringing this as a centerpiece to the residency. It also gives us the foundation to speak about why we create and how artistic creation can help us face the most difficult times in our lives.”

Puts’ music has been heard only once before in Orchestra Hall, when the CSO and violinist Joshua Bell presented a sample in 2024 as part of The Elements, a piece for violin and orchestra with five sections, each written by a different American composer.

After Emily – No Prisoner Be, composer Kevin Puts hopes there will be future opportunities for the CSO to perform more of his compositions: “I’m looking forward to developing a relationship with Chicago."

“Written by Pulitzer Prize winner Kevin Puts, ’Earth’ was the most accessible, focused and memorable of the five movements, thanks in part to the four-note ostinato that permeates it,” wrote Katherine Buzard in the Chicago Classical Review. “Out of the low string ostinato grows a pensive solo violin melody, which Bell played with sumptuous legato and honeyed tone.”

The Feb. 10 concert will give Symphony Center audiences their first opportunity to get a more in-depth sense of Puts’ music, and he hopes there will be future opportunities for the CSO to perform more of his compositions. “I’m looking forward to developing a relationship with Chicago,” he said.

The genesis of Emily – No Prisoner Be began when violinist Nick Kendall, one of the members of Time for Three, told Puts that the group had long wanted to do an album with a singer. Puts had just worked with DiDonato as part of the Metropolitan Opera’s presentations of his opera, The Hours, in 2022/23 and 2023/24, and he was sure she would be an ideal fit with the trio.

“I never questioned it once,” said DiDonato, who sang the role of Virginia Wolff in The Hours. “I could feel from his energy that he already was hearing this music and needed to put it on paper. He also was so convinced that the combination of myself and Time for Three would be electric, and he was not wrong!”

She called the recording session early in 2025 for Emily – No Prisoner Be and the preceding workshops “the most joyous, inspired, creative experiences” of her professional life. “Kevin had this vision and this knowledge that it would work,” she said. “All I did was show up and trust his vision.”

Puts immediately had a “clear idea” of a work in which the three members of Time for Three would play their instruments but also sing “almost like a gospel choir” as they accompanied and responded to DiDonato. “Such an unusual combination: two violins, bass, some male singing in three-part harmony with an operatic singer leading the way,” the composer said. “That was really inspiring to me.”

Puts began poring over poetry in the public domain, and he seized upon a Dickinson work with the opening line, “They shut me up with Prose,” which deals with creative freedom and the limits placed on female artists during the poet’s lifetime. He quickly saw that freedom could be the theme for the whole work, with a setting of that poem serving as the work’s introductory section.

Although DiDonato did suggest a couple of Dickinson poems she loved, Puts chose nearly all of the poems for the work. “I wrote often very quickly, just really without any second-guessing or hesitation of any sort,” he said. “I would write one song and I would think, ‘I need an upbeat, energetic one,’ and I would find a poem that was right for that. Things came very, very quickly.”

Puts is quick to acknowledge that many other composers have set Dickinson’s poems to music. “There is sort of nothing original about it from a certain external perspective,” he said. “But when you actually read this poetry, and not just the poems that everybody knows, it’s astounding how powerful it is and really how musical it is.”

Usually when he composes, he works from beginning to end just as a listener would hear it — no skipping ahead. But in this case, other than knowing which two song settings would begin the cycle and which one would end it, he had no idea at first about the order of the songs. “That was a challenge over the months — orderings things and finding the right trajectory for the whole 26-movement piece,” Puts said.

Like many of his works, influences in this song cycle range from Schubertian echoes, references to the so-called Great American Songbook and pop elements to extended harmonies and timbral effects associated with avant-garde contemporary classical music.

“As usual, I’ve been described as poly-stylistic,” Puts said. “I don’t feel that when I’m composing. I’m not making an effort to be that way but it often comes out that way, I suppose, because I’m looking for variety, and I have wide-ranging interests.”

Tours of Emily – No Prisoner Be to Europe and Asia are already in the works. “The plan is,” DiDonato said, “to replicate what I’ve done with In War & Peace and EDEN [two other semi-staged programs] — to take it around the world over several years. We’re on target for that, and perhaps more, I’m happy to say.”