Joel Puckett: Short Stories in London
Avie

Composers need performers, Joel Puckett (b. 1977) no exception. On this excellent hour-long primer, three works by the American composer are presented, each dramatically different and crafted with specific collaborators in mind. The orchestral song cycle There Was a Child Went Forth (2023) was not only created for the Grammy-winning Nicholas Phan but purposefully designed for the vulnerability of the tenor's voice. Similarly, Puckett's Trumpet Concerto (2024), his second for the instrument, was written for jazz trumpeter Sean Jones and again tailored to highlight aspects of the soloist's playing, his penchant for high register playing and, in Puckett's words, “ahead-of-the-beat grace notes.” The final work, the concerto grosso Short Stories (2013), is essentially a string quartet concerto that features four principal players of the London Symphony Orchestra as soloists and their orchestral colleagues as accompaniment. Violinists Benjamin Marquise Gilmore and Julián Gil Rodríguez, violist Gillianne Haddow, and cellist David Cohen distinguish themselves as the soloists, while the LSO under the assured conduction of Joseph Young does the same for it and the other two compositions.

As stated, Short Stories in London acts as a wonderful primer, but many a listener will already be familiar with Puckett's music. While a piece is crafted with the subject matter and performers in mind, certain things do recur in his compositions, lyricism and elegance, for example, plus clarity and polyphony. Abrasiveness and atonality are downplayed for writing marked by refinement and finesse. His is a music of integrity and sophistication that, while accessible, never panders. In addition to the three pieces presented on this release, others by him include the 2019 opera The Fix (about the famed Chicago White Sox scandal of 1919), the flute concerto The Shadow of Sirius (2010), and the double concerto for clarinet, flute, and orchestra, Concerto Duo (2012). When not composing, Puckett's Chair of Music Theory, Ear Training, and Piano Skills at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.

The most intimate of the album's three is There Was a Child Went Forth, whose four parts draw from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1892) for its texts and partner Phan with the LSO's string section. The tone is introspective in keeping with its stream-of-consciousness-like verses, and while the piece might at moments seem like a not-so-distant cousin to Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (and to a lesser degree Copland's Appalachian Spring), Whitman's texts are more optimistic than the James Agee one used by Barber. The music's intimacy and vulnerability are bolstered by augmenting the singer with strings only, but the performance is no less powerful for such reduction. As this captivating rendering shows, an intoxicating spell is cast when quietude is in play. It's elegiac and rhapsodic in keeping with material suffused with nostalgic longing and the wonder of discovery associated with childhood. Oft-delicate, this lustrous twenty-minute reverie provides a marvelous vehicle of expression for both Phan and the string players.

An admitted homage of sorts to Copland's Clarinet Concerto, commissioned and premiered by Benny Goodman, Puckett's Trumpet Concerto was created with a jazz musician in mind too, Sean Jones. And a very personal response to the trumpeter's artistry it is, too, what with its numerous high-altitude moments and repeated springboards for the soloist. The delicacy of There Was a Child Went Forth carries over into the opening “Slow and expressively” movement, however, which concentrates on hushed orchestral textures before ceding the spotlight to Jones's muted horn for a gripping cadenza rich in jazz inflection. The restrained character remains in place for the contemplative “Simple, like remembering an old song,” which draws forth blues-tinged musings from the soloist. Upper register flourishes at movement's end give the material a triumphant quality, after which the florid “Finale, with an air of mystery” makes good on its titular promise. The composer himself acknowledges that the work isn't a “jazz concerto” in the same way that Copland's isn't a “jazz concerto”: “I just tried to put Sean in positions to shine,” he states, and so he does.

Of the three works, it's Short Stories that wends the least predictable path. Presented in three parts with three movements in the first, two in the second, and three again in the third, the work doesn't separate the string quartet and orchestra into two separate halves. Instead, different combinations arise, such that in one movement only viola and cello appear, in another two violins and orchestra and elsewhere one with orchestra alone. Such change-ups make for compelling listening, even if the structure lacks the simplicity of the four-movement designs used for the other works. Tonal shifts are abundant: after “Somewhere near the end” initiates the first part triumphantly, the plaintive “Introit” opts for hymnal gestures and “The Priests” regal declamations. Whereas part two's “Recitative” and “mother and child” reinstate the elegiac character of There Was a Child Went Forth, the closing part favours animated drama in its three compact movements. True to its title, the piece truly does seem to recount eight separate stories in its twenty-three-minute running time.

September 2025