Flute Concerto Kevin Puts
American composer Kevin Puts was born on January 3, 1972 in St. Louis, Missouri. He studied composition and piano at the Eastman School of Music (BM and DMA) and Yale University (Master’s). His composition teachers include Samuel Adler, Jacob Druckman, David Lang, Christopher Rouse, Joseph Schwantner, Martin Bresnick, William Bolcom, and Bernard Rands. He taught at the University of Texas, Austin from 1997 to 2005. In 2006 he joined the faculty of the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He studied at the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts and has been associated with several of the most important summer music festivals, including Aspen and Cabrillo, and he has been composer-in-residence with the Fort Worth Symphony in Texas. He has an equally impressive number of awards and fellowships to his name and continues to receive commissions from prestigious artists and performing arts institutions. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his first opera, Silent Night (2012) and his fourth opera, The Hours (2022) has been a great success at the Metropolitan Opera. Puts’ Flute Concerto (2013) is the result of a commission from Bette and Joe Hirsch and received its premiere at the Cabrillo Festival that same year with Adam Walker as soloist and Carolyn Kuan conducting. The work has been recorded on the Naxos label (2016) with Walker as soloist and Marin Alsop leading the Peabody Conservatory Orchestra. The work is scored for solo flute, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, percussion, piano, and strings.
Kevin Puts has emerged as one of the stars among contemporary American composers. He is a composer of wide-ranging talent, whose music has been described as “plush, propulsive” by the New York Times, and as the work of “a master polystylist” by Opera News. The composer wrote the following notes about his Flute Concerto in 2013 (www.kevinputs.com):
Bette and Joe Hirsch are longtime patrons of the annual Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz, California who became fans of my music when they heard my Symphony no. 2 performed at the festival in 2002. Incidentally, this was the first time Marin Alsop, the festival’s Music Director, had programmed a piece of mine and the beginning of a musical friendship I continue to cherish.
A few years ago, Bette secretly approached the festival about commissioning an orchestra piece from me for Joe’s 75th birthday. Not long after, Joe also secretly approached the festival about a chamber piece for the couple’s 35th wedding anniversary. My thought was that a single piece might suffice (!), and why not a flute concerto, as I had never written one, and Bette played the flute in her youth?
What opens the concerto is a melody I have had swimming around in my head for more than half a lifetime now, something I began singing to myself in college and for which I had never found appropriate context. I was reminded of it while listening to a recording of Adam Walker, the brilliant Principal Flutist of the London Symphony Orchestra and the soloist whom Maestra Alsop had invited to premier the concerto. Built on a simple three-note motive, the theme is lyrical and easy to remember but somewhat rhythmically irregular at the same time.
The second movement was written during a period in which I was rather obsessed with the second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto K. 467, often referred to as the “Elvira Madigan concerto” due to its use in the eponymously titled film of the 70’s. What Mozart could evoke with a major chord repeated in triplets, a simple bass-line played pizzicato, and a melody floating above is mind-boggling and humbling to me. Nonetheless, I decided to enter into this hallowed environment, and, in a sense, to speak from within it in my own voice.
Rhythm drives the third movement, its main ideas drawn from the main theme of the first movement and culminating in a highly energetic dialogue between the soloist and a small, contrapuntal band of winds, brass and percussion.
Program Notes by David B. Levy and Kevin Puts, © 2023/2013
A Symphony to Dante’s Divine Comedy, S. 109 Franz Liszt
Franz (Ferenc) Liszt was born on October 22, 1811 in Raiding, Austria (Doborján, Hungary) and died on July 31, 1886 in Bayreuth, Germany. Known primarily as the great virtuoso pianist and composer for that instrument, Liszt produced many orchestral works, each of which addressed novel ways in which the genre might develop in the wake of Beethoven’s symphonies. One of his innovations was the concept of the “symphonic poem,” a one-movement work inspired by extra-musical influences. He produced 13 symphonic poems, the most famous of which is Les préludes (1849). He also penned two symphonies: A Faust Symphony and the Symphony to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Ideas for his Faust and Dante Symphonies first appeared in 1839 but the latter piece did not take its final shape until 1856-7. Liszt also gave his love of the great Florentine poet in his Après une lecture du Dante: Fantasia quasi Sonata for piano in 1849. The Dante Symphony received its first performance in Dresden’s Hoftheater on November 7, 1857 under Liszt’s direction. This premiere did not go well, but it was better received after a performance in Prague on March 11, 1858. The Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, Liszt’s mistress, provided a written to help the audience understand the work’s unusual structure. Inspired by Dante Alighieri’s poetic medieval allegory, Divina commedia, the Dante Symphony is scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, 2 sets of timpani, percussion, 2 harps, harmonium, and strings. A women’s choir and vocal soloists are called for toward the end of the second movement.
Franz Liszt is a composer who defies simple categorization. No sooner do we identify him as a virtuoso pianist, then his accomplishments as a conductor and composer of symphonic poems come into view. Accuse him of bombast and the understated softness of Nuages gris whispers in our ear. His reputation as an egoist is given lie by the generosity he exhibited toward Chopin, Berlioz, Wagner, and many other composers. The notorious young womanizer morphs into the devout Catholic cleric of maturity. Mephistopheles becomes Abbé Liszt. In many ways, his Dante Symphony represents an important stage along the way of his transition toward the latter version of his persona.
The Dante Symphony comprises two movements. The first of these is a representation of the “Inferno,” while the second is a musical depiction of “Purgatorio.” The third part of Dante’s masterpiece, “Paradiso,” is only hinted at toward the end of “Purgatorio.” The opening movement, “Inferno” begins with a slow introduction that presents a series of bold statements in the lower brass and strings. Each of these statements has a distinctive rhythmic profile that in the written score include the following words:
Per me si va nella città dolente, Through me is the way to the sorrowful city,
Per me si va nell’eterno dolore, Through me is the way to eternal sorrow,
Per me si va tra la perduta gente. Through me is the way of the lost people.
Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate. Abandon all hope ye who enter here.
The sad words of warning in Dante’s terza rima come from Canto 3 of “Inferno,” the first part of the Divina Commedia. What follows represents Dante’s descent into Hell, led by the spirit of the ancient poet, Virgil. The main sections of the first movement depict the first and second circles of Hell. In this music, Liszt depicts the infernal sounds of the howling winds that torment the damned. As the descent into the nether regions continues, the music focuses on Canto 5, in which we meet the doomed lovers, Paolo and Francesca da Rimini. As we move to the Seventh Circle of Hell, we again hear the “Lasciate ogni speranza” motto and references to Canto 14 in which Dante depicts the fate of Capaneus, the blasphemer who is found in Greek mythology. The movement continues its descent into Hell, ending with a coda that leads Dante and Virgil toward “Purgatorio,” the subject of the second movement.
The structure of the second movement reflects Dante’s ascent up Mount Pergatory, beginning with the stages of “Ante-Purgatory,” and continuing through the seven cornices of Mount Pergatory itself, and at last the arrival at the Earthly Paradise found at the summit. Liszt chose, in this final section, to introduce the human voice as the women’s chorus invoke the opening of the canticle of the Virgin Mary, Magnificat anima mea Dominum, Et exsultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo (My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior), to which he adds the words, Hosanna! Hallelujah! Interestingly, Liszt provided two very different, yet authentic, endings to the Dante Symphony from which conductors may choose. One, on the advice of Princess Carolyne, brings the work to an end loudly. When the composer illustrated on the piano the Faust and Dante Symphonies for Richard Wagner in 1856, Wagner strongly disagreed with the Princess’s idea, and Liszt ended the work quietly in a reverential tone, indicative of the ultimate goal of the Divine Comedy—the arrival in Paradise.