Jennifer Higdon / Kevin Puts: Letters for the Future, Time for Three

Time for Three sit at an unusual point in the classical world: a self-contained trio, two violins and a double bass, no piano, no fixed accompanist, that moves between fully notated concert works and looser, improvisation-inflected playing closer to bluegrass or singer-songwriter traditions. Letters for the Future, recorded with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Xian Zhang, puts that trio in front of a full orchestra for two newly commissioned triple concertos, written fifteen years apart by two different Pulitzer Prize-winning American composers. Kevin Puts’s Contact, one of the two works, won the 2023 Grammy Award for Best Classical Composition.

Rather than a single new commission, the disc pairs Jennifer Higdon’s Concerto 4-3, written for the trio in 2007, with Puts’s Contact, composed specifically for this recording. Hearing both together lets you track how differently two composers have approached the same unusual brief, a concertante triple concerto for an ensemble that doesn’t slot into any standard chamber-music category, across a fifteen-year gap.

About the two concertos

Higdon’s Concerto 4-3 was the trio’s first major orchestral commission, written for their earlier lineup and predating this specific recording by a decade and a half; its inclusion here alongside the brand-new Contact effectively frames the album as a survey of the ensemble’s own commissioning history rather than a single-work showcase. Puts’s Contact, the Grammy-winning work, is built in four connected movements, The Call, a scherzo titled Codes, a return to Contact, and a closing Convivium, language that suggests a piece thinking about communication and connection as its organising idea, rather than following a conventional fast-slow-fast concerto shape.

About the performers

Time for Three’s two violinists, Nicolas Kendall and Charles Yang, and bassist Ranaan Meyer both have roots at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute, giving this specific pairing with the Philadelphia Orchestra a genuine local connection rather than a guest-soloist arrangement assembled for the occasion. Xian Zhang, the orchestra’s conductor here, has built a career associated with new American orchestral commissions as much as with core repertoire, making her a fitting conductor for two recently written concertante works rather than a generalist brought in for a single project.

Why a Grammy for composition, not performance

It’s worth noting that the 2023 Grammy this album is best known for was awarded in the Best Classical Composition category, recognising Puts’s Contact itself as a piece of writing, rather than in one of the performance categories. That distinction matters for how you listen to the disc: it’s as much a document of two substantial new additions to the American concerto repertoire as it is a showcase for the trio’s own playing, even though the performances are, inevitably, what actually carries that writing to a listener.

About the composers

Jennifer Higdon is among the most performed living American composers and won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2010 for her own Violin Concerto, a track record that makes her Concerto 4-3, written specifically for this trio in 2007, a genuinely major commission rather than a minor commercial add-on to the disc. Kevin Puts won his own Pulitzer in 2012 for his opera Silent Night, giving the album two Pulitzer-winning composers writing for the same unconventional ensemble across a fifteen-year span, a rare enough pairing that it’s worth noting on its own terms, independent of the Grammy that followed.

A note on this page

This review was written fresh by the mmmusic team about a real, current recording rather than an original mmmusic critic’s words, it sits outside the site’s recovered 1991–2018 archive, as new coverage of what’s actually being commissioned, recorded and awarded now. The trio’s real lineup, both composers, and the Grammy category were each independently verified rather than assumed from the shortlist brief that started this page.