Kevin Puts is 50 today. Puts was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2012 for his opera “Silent Night,” about the real-life, unsanctioned 1914 Christmas truce between Scottish, French, and German troops on the Western Front. It’s a poignant story, in whatever form. (It was also dramatized in the 2005 film “Joyeux Noël.”) The opera beautifully captures the transcendent moments of humanity, like shafts of sunlight piercing clouds, during one of the costliest and most violent conflicts in the bloody history of warfare. The work was given its world premiere by Minnesota Opera in 2011. I was lucky enough to catch Opera Philadelphia’s production in 2013.
Puts’ latest opera, “The Hours,” co-commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera, was projected to be unveiled at the Met in 2022. It looks like it’s been pushed back to next season. In the meantime, two concert performances will be given by the Philadelphia Orchestra, on March 18 & 20, with Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting. The cast for the Met debut was to have included Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara, and Joyce Di Donato as Virginia Woolf. For the Philadelphia performances, Fleming and O’Hara will be joined by Jennifer Johnson Cano.
I’ve never heard anything by this composer that hasn’t been direct, beautiful, and worthwhile. He’s a contemporary artist who has had the good fortune to be rewarded for his courage to remain true to himself, avoiding the pitfall of gussying up what he wishes to express with a lot of extraneous modernist effects, in order to maintain his street cred, as some composers of a clearly romantic bent had done in the previous generation. Nor is he a post-modernist hipster, a keyboard noodler, an overweening pop artist, or a soft-headed, wannabe film composer.
Puts’ language is romantic, but it is not the lingua franca of the 19th century. In embracing tonality and melody, he honors the most fundamental purpose of music, which is not simply to express, but to communicate, and he does so intelligently, in a manner that is capable of reaching a wide audience without cheapening his art.
Furthermore, at 50, he still has a long career ahead of him.
Many happy returns, Kevin Puts.
“Inspiring Beethoven” (with disturbing slideshow)
The Flute Concerto, which flirts with Mozart in its second movement
The Symphony No. 2, a response to the events of 9/11
“Dona nobis pacem” from “Silent Night”
