Kevin Puts Photo © by David White
World Premiere: August 2, 2013
Most Recent HSO Performance: This is the HSO's first performance of this work.
Instrumentation: Piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, percussion, and strings: violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and bass
Duration: 23'
Flute Concerto (2013)
Kevin Puts
(Born January 3, 1972 in St. Louis)
Kevin Puts, born on January 3, 1972 in St. Louis, received his bachelor’s degree from the Eastman School of Music (1994), his master’s degree from Yale (1996), and his doctorate from Eastman (1999); his composition teachers have included Jacob Druckman, Joseph Schwantner, Christopher Rouse, Samuel Adler and David Burge. He also participated in the 1996 Tanglewood Festival Fellowship Program, where he worked with Bernard Rands and William Bolcom. Puts taught at the University of Texas at Austin from 1999 until the fall of 2006, when he joined the faculty of the Peabody Institute in Baltimore; he is also Director of the Minnesota Orchestra Composer’s Institute. Kevin Puts has accumulated an impressive array of distinctions: the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his acclaimed opera Silent Night, based on the 2005 French film Joyeux Nöel and premiered by Minnesota Opera in November 2012; from 1996 to 1999, he served concurrently as Composer-in-Residence with the California Symphony (which premiered three of his works) and Young Concert Artists, Inc. in New York; he has received commissions from the National Symphony Orchestra, Boston Pops, Minnesota Orchestra, Pacific Symphony Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Aspen Music Festival, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players, Eroica Trio, Ying Quartet and other noted ensembles and organizations; he was the first undergraduate to be awarded the Charles Ives Scholarship by the American Academy of Arts and Letters; he has received grants and fellowships from BMI, ASCAP, Tanglewood, the Hanson Institute for American Music and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the Benjamin H. Danks Award for Excellence in Orchestral Composition from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Barlow International Prize for Orchestral Music; and in 2007 he was Composer-in-Residence with both the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival and Fort Worth Symphony. His most recent opera is an adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, co-commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and Philadelphia Orchestra, is slated for premiere in 2022 starring Renée Fleming, Joyce DiDonato and Kelli O’Hara.
Puts wrote that his Flute Concerto, composed in 2013 for the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in California, “opens with 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. Built on a simple three-note motive, the theme is lyrical and easy to remember but somewhat irregular rhythmically 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 No. 21, K. 467, often referred to as the ‘Elvira Madigan Concerto’ due to its use in the eponymously titled film of the 1970s. 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, whose main ideas are drawn from the main theme of the first movement and culminate in a highly energetic dialogue between the soloist and a small, contrapuntal band of winds, brass and percussion.”
©2022 Dr. Richard E. Rodda