"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."
"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."
Kevin Puts composed Emily - No Prisoner Be as a cycle of two dozen Emily Dickinson songs with interludes for mezzo-soprano and string trio. The work achieves both intimacy and symphonic breadth, projecting well in a large auditorium. Joyce DiDonato performed the mezzo role, accompanied by the trio Time for Three. The opening setting of "They Shut me Up in Prose" contrasts stillness and liberated poetic imagination through furious trembling strings and close vocal harmonies. DiDonato introduces a memorable melodic hook that quickly expands into soaring vocal lines. The second song receives a hushed, diarylike musical treatment.
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