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.
