*Emily - No Prisoner Be,* Feb 19 2026

I saw Emily - No Prisoner Be at Carnegie Hall on Feb 19, 2026. My dear friends Martha and Bill had seen it in Madison the week before and raved about it. Martha told me it was playing at Carnegie Hall, I happened to be available, I bought a ticket in the balcony for $40, I was there.

It's a new piece by Kevin Puts, settings of Emily Dickinson poems. It being billed as "a theatrical song cycle" - - for me it exists somewhere between a concert and an opera. It's an opera because it's staged, it has a fully integrated set, projection, and lighting design, and the overall vibe is dramatic. It's a concert because the singer and musicians are all onstage together, it's amplified (though I'm hearing new operas with amplification lately), and while the vibe is dramatic it doesn't precisely tell a story.

The singer was Joyce DiDonato, an American mezzo I've heard at the Met maybe about ten times. She's a dedicated, highly expressive singer. The instruments were Time for Three, a trio of Nicolas Kendall (violin and viola), Charles Yang (violin), and Ranaan Meyer (double bass). The three string players also sing - - it was a surprise to me what good singers they are!

Puts had worked with DiDonato on his adaptation of The Hours, which I saw at the Met. She played Virginia Woolf in that. And he worked with Time for Three on Contact, a triple concerto for them. He enjoyed both of those collaborations so much he decided to bring them together.

We heard quiet electronic music before the show started. JDD came onstage in full light and wandered around a little bit, ending up sitting at her desk. Time for Three came onstage, the house lights went down, and the show started. I was thrilled by the incisive playing by the string players, also the masterful writing for them. Puts uses the strings in an idiomatic way, having them play two strings at the same time, harmonics, pizzicato, the whole bag of tricks. Why the hell not, no extra charge.

The string playing was often rugged and fierce. I'd describe JDD's singing that way, too - - her singing was a little too strident and high strung a little too much of the time for my taste. It was an entirely appropriate expression of the desperation in the poems but there was a little too much of it. I feel like this sort of thing should be used sparingly, it shouldn't be the one of the primary colors.

I was reminded of something a critic wrote about Maria Callas at the time (I'm paraphrasing). He had heard her recordings and was eager to hear her live. He was impressed by her artistry and the way she dug into the text, coloring every word in whatever well-known opera she was singing (Norma, Traviata, whatever). But he found himself longing for one beautiful, elegant, uninflected line. I will say this about JDD: her dedication was convincing.

My favorite song was "Because I would not stop for death." Puts wrote it with the string players playing pizzicato and singing the text in block chords, then JDD singing the second line after them. This song had unpredictable but inevitable changes in meter, it was captivating. It made me want to own a recording.

Another song had a puzzling mixture of live and recorded music. I couldn't tell quite what I was hearing - - was it pre-recorded strings and Time for Three playing live on top of that? And maybe it was JDD singing something and then a recording playing of what she had sung a few seconds before? Or was it all recorded ahead of time and they performed live on top of it? I couldn't wrap my brain around it, an experience that I enjoyed!

One of the last songs had Time for Three singing a cappella, it took me a minute to recognize the tune as "Lo, how a rose e'er blooming." That was touching. The final song was the title song. I'll paste it in here with Dickinson's distinctive use of dashes:

No Prisoner be—

Where Liberty—

Himself—abide with Thee—

Those lines were sung over and over with a mounting sense of triumph and exultation. Puts cleverly wound this down to become very quiet, ending the piece with JDD singing the final words a cappella at her desk. I was flooded with tears, it was such a thrilling ending. The performance was meaningful to the composer, the performers, the audience, and dare I say to Emily Dickinson herself.

The ending is the ending of this promo video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bj4BOJWsqrg