Kevin Puts (b. 1972)
Concerto for Orchestra (2023)
Silent Night Elegy (2020)
Virelai (after Guillaume de Machaut) (2019)
St. Louis Symphony Orchestra/Stéphane Denève
rec. live, 21/22 September 2019 (Virelai), 7-9 February 2020 (Silent Night Elegy), 21/22 January 2023 (Concerto), Powell Hall, St. Louis, USA
Reviewed from lossless download
Delos DE3620 [51]
I first encountered the music of Kevin Puts a couple of years ago, reviewing a Naxos recording of three orchestral works (review). I was very impressed by his style – contemporary but adhering to the three basics of music (or at least what I think of as music): rhythm, melody and harmony – and this new recording of these three pieces has reinforced that opinion.
Puts created his Concerto for Orchestra for the St Louis Orchestra, and it is a brilliant showcase for the players’ talents. Set in six movements, alternating slow and fast, it is packed with beautiful melodies, exciting rhythms and a generous mix of orchestral colours. I greatly admire Puts for not following the now cliched opening to a contemporary classical work, i.e. a huge percussion outburst. Instead, the work begins quietly in the strings, and I immediately thought of Vaughan Williams. In the Arietta, there is a beautiful melody passed through the woodwinds, with gentle percussion as support. The finale (a second Caccia) begins with a reminder of the opening of the work, and then the bustling rhythms take over. The twenty-three minutes go past in the blink of an eye.
Silent Night was Kevin Puts’s first opera, written in 2011, and achieved great success, including the Pulitzer Prize. It used the story of the Christmas Eve truce in World War I, and this Elegy cleverly takes music from the opera and morphs it into a sequence which sounds totally organic, and not bitty or forced together. Puts says that the success of Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes was the inspiration to create the Elegy, but that a single movement would work better. It might be thought that the music might be restricted by the solemnity of the story it tells, but across its twenty-three minute span, there is variety, including a battle sequence and a haunting tune by a bagpiper. The final hymn-like section is very affecting.
Virelai was written to mark the appointment of Stéphane Denève as Music Director in St Louis, and uses a melody by Machaut, brilliantly harmonised and given a thrilling and driving rhythm. It strongly reminds me (as indeed do the other two works) of the style of Australian composer Graeme Koehne, whose music I love, and who created a similar work to the Elegy from his own WWI-inspired composition, the ballet 1914 (review).
The booklet indicates that recordings were made over multiple days in the orchestra’s hall, so I assume these were concert performances. That being so, the St Louis audience is impeccably quiet, and I am envious of them being able to hear this music live and before anyone else. The recording engineers have done a superb job in capturing the detail.
The first time I listened to these three works, I greatly enjoyed them, and repeated listens have only added to that pleasure. If you like your contemporary orchestral music to have those three elements I mentioned before, then you really need to hear the music of Kevin Puts. It is not dumbed down in any way, but sophisticated, emotional, beautifully crafted and a delight from first to last.
David Barker
Previous review: Dominic Hartley (September 2025)
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