Kevin Puts
Born: 1972, St. Louis, Missouri
The Brightness of Light
- Work Composed: 2015
- Premiere: July 20, 2019, Koussevitzky Music Shed at Tanglewood Music Center, Renée Fleming, soprano; Rodney Gilfry, baritone; Boston Symphony Orchestra, Andris Nelsons conducting
- Instrumentation: solo soprano and baritone, 3 flutes (incl. 2 piccolos), 2 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets (incl. E-flat clarinet), 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets (incl. piccolo trumpet), 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, chimes, Chinese cymbals, claves, crotales, glockenspiel, marimba, sizzle cymbal, suspended cymbals, tam-tam, triangle, tuned gongs, vibraphone, xylophone, harp, celeste, piano, strings
Duration: approx. 45 minutes
In 2015, I received the honor of a commission from my alma mater, the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. The school’s orchestra was planning a trip to perform at Lincoln Center and wanted to include a new work written by an alumni composer to feature an alumni performer. The performer they had in mind was Renée Fleming and — to my great excitement — she accepted the offer, thereby initiating one of the most treasured collaborations of my career.
We wanted to focus on an iconic American woman as the subject, and I happened on a quote by Georgia O’Keeffe:
My first memory is of the brightness of light, light all around.
I could imagine this line sung right at the start. I learned that O’Keeffe had written thousands of letters over the course of her lifetime, many of them to Alfred Stieglitz, the renowned photographer and art curator who became her husband. Sarah Greenough’s indispensable two-volume My Faraway One (Vol. 2 forthcoming) includes the complete correspondence between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz from their first contact in 1915 until Stieglitz’s death in 1946. With intense emotion — and often humor — these letters chronicle O’Keeffe’s journey from a young artist enthralled by and indebted to the older Stieglitz to her complete immersion in the North American Southwest, where she lived alone for many years, finding inspiration for her best-known works. The letters themselves are the property of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, and I am deeply grateful for the right they granted me to craft a “libretto” made of excerpts from the letters. Letters from Georgia was premiered by Ms. Fleming and the Eastman Philharmonia at Alice Tully Hall on November 14, 2016, with Neil Varon conducting.
Having wholeheartedly embraced the role of O’Keeffe, Renée proposed expanding the work to include an equal part for Stieglitz. I welcomed this challenge of creating a larger work which would encompass their years both together and apart, from the first cautious exchanges between the two artists, through their impassioned and complicated relationship, to the years long after Stieglitz’s death, when I imagine O’Keeffe writing to him even still.
By design, all the music from Letters found its way into The Brightness of Light. Ironically perhaps, it was the vivid, poetic language of these two artists best known for their visual art which I found most inspiring in the creation of these works.
It has been a great privilege to work with the baritone Rodney Gilfry, who brings his tremendous gifts to the role of Stieglitz. I am grateful to Wendall Harrington for creating the projections which accompany the work, to Bette and Joseph Hirsch for their generous support of the work’s first incarnation, and to all the co-commissioners who have made its creation possible.
—Kevin Puts
Pulitzer Prize- and Grammy-winning composer Kevin Puts has established himself as one of America’s leading composers, gaining international acclaim for his “plush, propulsive” music (The New York Times), and described by Opera News as “a master polystylist.” He has been commissioned and performed by leading organizations around the world, including the Metropolitan Opera, Philadelphia Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, Opera Philadelphia, Minnesota Opera and many more, and he has collaborated with world-class artists such as Renée Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Marin Alsop, among others.
In March 2022, Puts’ fourth opera, The Hours, had its world premiere on the concert stage by The Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Séguin and was hailed as a “historic event...with a lush orchestration that hits you in the solar plexus” (The Philadelphia Inquirer). The Hours premiered to sold-out houses as a fully staged production at the Metropolitan Opera in November 2022, starring sopranos Renée Fleming and Kelli O’Hara and mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, and was called “a stunning triumph” by Variety magazine. The opera’s revival in May 2024 played to packed houses and marked the first instance in the Metropolitan Opera’s history of a work returning the season after its premiere. Other highlights of 2022 included the West Coast premiere of The Brightness of Light featuring Renée Fleming and Rod Gilfry with the Los Angeles Opera Orchestra. Written for Time for Three, his triple concerto Contact had its world premiere in March 2022 with the Florida Orchestra and continues to receive performances around the world. A recording of the piece by The Philadelphia Orchestra and conductor Xian Zhang was released on the Deutsche Grammophon album Letters for the Future and was awarded “Best Contemporary Classical Composition” at the 2023 Grammy Awards. Puts was named Musical America’s Composer of the Year in 2024.
Puts’ breakthrough opera Silent Night — for which he was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize following its 2011 premiere by Minnesota Opera — has been heralded as “remarkable” (The New York Times) and “stunning” (Twin Cities Examiner). In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Puts has received numerous honors and awards for composition. Since 2006, he has been a member of the composition faculty at the Peabody Institute and serves as Distinguished Visiting Composer at the Juilliard School in the 2024–25 academic year. He also returns to his role as Director of the Minnesota Orchestra Composer’s Institute in 2025.