‘Emily — No Prisoner Be’: Kevin Puts Reimagines Dickinson

When Kevin Puts’s song cycle “Emily — No Prisoner Be” had its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on Thursday, he signaled that this “wasn’t going to be your grandmother’s Emily Dickinson song cycle.” A 2012 Pulitzer Prize winner, Puts assembles roughly two dozen poems into a restive, often energetic loose narrative that treats Dickinson as someone who withdrew to thrive rather than wither.

Mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and the string trio Time for Three realized that vision with intense focus. Andrew Staples’s staging turned the poet’s plain bedroom into a dreamlike space of gathered white drapes while William Reynolds’s lighting shifted from warm pinks to blinding yellows; the program began and ended with Emily at her desk in white.

Puts’s score leans on adventurous string techniques: Time for Three tapped out percussion, played like guitars, sang three-part harmonies and used harmonics and pizzicato to create sculpted ostinatos and fugal chasing.

kevin puts, emily dickinson, song cycle, joyce didonato, carnegie hall, string trio, andrew staples, william reynolds, pulitzer prize, pizzicato