LA JOLLA, Calif. — The opening concert of La Jolla Music Society’s 2026-27 season Oct. 8 in its flagship space, Baker-Baum Concert Hall, showcased the 58-year-old performing-arts presenter’s two strengths: high standards and innovation. In the song cycle Emily: No Prisoner Be (2025), strobe-light-and-haze theatrical staging brought Emily Dickinson’s searing, elliptical poetry alive. High culture met mass-appeal showmanship to mostly happy effect.
Emily was conceived in 2022, when Joyce DiDonato, whose portrayal of novelist Virginia Woolf helped Kevin Puts’ fourth opera, The Hours, succeed on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, accepted the composer’s offer to set Dickinson’s poetry for her and the trio Time for Three, for which he’d composed a concerto that same year. The Emily cycle’s 24-plus poems (some movements are instrumentals) include a mix of Dickinson favorites (“Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” “Hope Is the Thing,” “I Dwell in Possibility,” etc.) and poems (“Tell Her,” also known as “Going – To – Her”) rarely essayed by the hundreds of composers – including Copland, Previn, John Adams, and Michael Tilson Thomas — who’ve set her verse.
Though most of the 1,600-plus Dickinson settings have been for voice and piano or chorus, Puts wisely chose to break new ground. His accompaniment for DiDonato’s vocal lines, which range across two and a half octaves, is not only composed for an under-used chamber ensemble, string trio, but in Time for Three’s case an unusual flavor of string trio: two violins (Nicholas Kendall and Charles Yang) and double bass (Ranaan Meyer) — no middle voice. More importantly, aided by Dickinson’s surface-level metrical simplicity (often based on basic hymn and ballad meters), Puts conjures a range of styles, from rock gestures, Appalachian ballad and folklike fiddling, jazz harmonies and syncopation, and gospel inflections to, of course, art-song tradition.
Some of Puts’ settings shone like gold. With its aria-like melody and gently tenuous string-writing, “Again – His Voice Is at the Door” evolved from a sinister, predatorial confrontation into some kind of eerie encounter with the supernatural (Dickinson’s “I leave my Dog at home” aside seems to be a wink at her own portentous subject). In “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” a quietly steady vocal pedal point with an extra beat around “Stop” and “Stopped” for Time for Three became the perfect counterpoint to DiDonato’s soaring lines and somehow underscores the irony of Death being “kindly.”
The morbid buried-alive connotations of “I Felt a Funeral” are driven home effectively via Puts’ mournful trudge in the bass and the violins’ bent-note bowing. Perhaps Puts’ most ideal marriages of music and text are the graceful and moving “Her Face” and “If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking” — one a love song, the other Dickinson’s atypically direct and selfless anthem.
Not everything worked. Puts’ oddly flat and musically slight treatment of “I Reason, Earth Is Short” seems inadequate to Dickinson’s black humor (“Vitality cannot excel Decay”) and her almost flippant “But what of that?” repetitions. Poems like “A Little Snow” and “I Tie My Hat—I Crease My Shawl” elude his music’s best efforts to illuminate them. Sometimes selection (not sequencing) was the issue: Against the searing power of many of the poems set here, “The Props Assist the House” felt like lower-drawer work.
While Dickinson often cast herself in verse as diminished physically, DiDonato reimagined her as physically unbridled, a force of nature restlessly ranging across the gamut of thought and emotion. And though DiDonato’s penetrating mezzo-soprano might seem ill-suited to Dickinson’s painfully private verse, her artistic and emotive authenticity made it all work.
Dressed in white (Dickinson’s favored color in her final years), DiDonato used the writing desk center stage not only as a prop symbolizing poetic creation but also as an anchoring platform on which she lay or crouched, gestured floridly, or gamboled about, as when she kneeled disciple-like at the feet of a trio member. DiDonato in effect placed Dickinson’s often coolly depersonalized verse into liberated motion. And that voice: DiDonato’s (miked) instrument seemed capable of anything. Together with her tireless movement and communicative expressions, she drove the piece through her will to emotional connection.
If Emily: No Prisoner Be possesses an internal momentum — not a slam-dunk for a deliberately non-linear sequence of highly elusive, self-effacing verse — that momentum was dealt an unwelcome blow two-thirds through, when Kendall’s E-string unceremoniously gave out. Filling the two-plus-minute pause Kendall needed to re-string offstage, DiDonato gamely entertained the sympathetic audience: “Right in the middle of the best line!” she complained with mock offense, adding “Emily’s pencil sketches were full of scribbles; she crossed things out and wrote again and erased — but she wasn’t a string player” (LOL).
This unplanned intermission proved only a momentary distraction from a piece that would have been far less memorable or effective if composed only for voice and piano or if it clung to conventional classical form. Time for Three was indispensable: in their instrumental dexterity (harmonics, pizzicato, guitar-like strumming, and percussion effects), superb vocal harmonies that moderated DiDonato’s piercing vocal strength, and improvisatory feel in the work’s interludes and instrumentals (three “bee” scherzos reflecting the poet’s fascination with certain garden insects).
In a deft stroke seen in Emily’s 19 previous tour stops, the curtain call led to DiDonato inviting the audience to reprise the gospel-like “No Prisoner Be” (originally for chorus) that concluded the work. It brought the evening to a moving communal end.
