Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts (b. 1972) is known for his distinctive and richly coloured musical voice. Making their label début, Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra perform Kevin Puts’ Symphony No.4 (From Mission San Juan), inspired by Native American melodies. Opening this programme of world première recordings, Craig Hella Johnson leads Conspirare in two choral settings of texts by women poets: 'To Touch the Sky' and 'If I Were a Swan'.
Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for 'Silent Night', an opera commissioned by Minnesota Opera and co-written with librettist Mark Campbell, Kevin Puts has been hailed as one of the most important composers of his generation. His work has been commissioned and performed by leading orchestras in the United States and abroad, including the New York Philharmonic, Tonhalle-Orchester (Zurich), the Saint Louis Symphony, Houston Symphony, and the Minnesota Orchestra, and by soloists and chamber ensembles such as Evelyn Glennie, Yo-Yo Ma, Jeffrey Kahane, the Eroica Trio and the Miro Quartet.
A native of St. Louis, Missouri, he received his training as a composer and pianist at the Eastman School of Music and Yale University. Since 2006, he has been a member of the composition department at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

“The performances are stunning in their purity and control… an attractive and effective score… The orchestration is consistently brilliant, too, and the music’s kaleidoscopic shifts in emotional terrain- from the quietly spiritual to the rhythmically insistent to the grandly confident to the achingly poignant are handled with aplomb” International Record Review