By Aaron Keebaugh

Kevin Puts’s mesmerizing song cycle probes the passion, loss, and resignation in the relationship between the artists Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz.

Renée Fleming and Rod Gilfry performing, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, The Brightness of Light. Photo: Hilary Scott

Their relationship was forged through letters. And it fractured due to unfaithfulness.

But Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz could never completely rid themselves of each other. Even while separated geographically — by the vastness of the American West — the couple continued to share their innermost thoughts, hopes, and intuitions of wonder.

That psychologically sustaining relationship forms the nexus of The Brightness of Light, Kevin Puts’s mesmerizing song cycle, which probes  the couple’s passion, loss, and eventual resignation. If the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s performance of the score this past weekend revealed anything — beyond just the music’s sheer beauty — it’s that O’Keeffe and Stieglitz lived, intensely, for each moment.

Conductor Andris Nelsons first led The Brightness of Light at Tanglewood in 2019. Plans to bring the piece to Symphony Hall stalled because of the pandemic. But the composition finally reached Boston last weekend, signaling a milestone for Puts — this was his first piece to be heard in Symphony Hall.

The composer’s debut was inevitable. For some time Puts has been a fixture in the musical firmament. His four symphonies, in their distinct way, are rooted in the American romanticism of the ’40s. The Boston Symphony Chamber Players have performed a number of Puts’s works for smaller forces. But it is his operas that, at least at the moment, have garnered him the most success. His Silent Night, written for Minnesota Opera, won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, and the critically acclaimed The Hours graced the stage of Metropolitan Opera in 2022.

That expansive dramatic sensibility might be why The Brightness of Light feels so sweeping, somewhat novelistic. Puts crafted its libretto from the surviving letters between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, and he focuses on capturing emotional and intellectual twists and turns: the highs and lows of their initial infatuation, thoughts on art and photography, the agonizing rupture of their relationship and an attempted reconciliation.

The Brightness of Light originated as a cycle reflective of O’Keeffe’s perspective. But soprano Renée Fleming, for whom it was written, suggested filling the piece out with letters from Stieglitz, a role here sung by Rod Gilfry. What emerged was an intimate look at how the couple intermingled love and regret. This is Puts’s most arrestingly symphonic score to date as well as his most searchingly human.

That humanity comes across through propulsive and sweeping music that taps into the majesty of O’Keeffe’s Southwestern vistas as well as Stieglitz’s inner struggles to win back his lover after their separation. Various colors abound. Opening murmurs erupt in seismic grandeur, recalling the vibrant light captured in O’Keeffe’s vision of the sunrise. That sonic contrast sets the stage for a continued play between extremes. Puts’s lines don’t soar so much as coalesce around fractured gestures, which anchor the vocal parts, delivered here with earnest conviction by Fleming and Gilfry.

Fleming’s voice has retained much of its youthful luster. Gilfry’s baritone provided oaken counterweight. As O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, they located the warm humanity etched into Puts’s widely leaping phrases. The singers conveyed the burning desires of “Ache,” where the couple expressed their passion for each other. “Violin,” with its scratchy sonorities, brought in a touch of humor as O’Keeffe relays her attempts to play the instrument, badly.

Andris Nelsons conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Photo: Hilary Scott

Video projections, designed by Wendall K. Harrington, display paintings, photographs, and footage of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz. These added the right amount of documentary grounding as well as encouraging our empathy with the central figures. We watch the couple as if we’ve known them all along because we see their words and their art. Taken together, the music and visuals came off as a kind of home movie — evoking the tenderness of fond memories of love and loss.

Yet there’s an ironic twinge of fantasy. The piece concludes with O’Keeffe, alone after Stieglitz’s passing in 1946. Yet she still writes to him. Puts’s music captures the full dimensions of her yearning feelings, her need for Stieglitz’s voice. Their connection remained a powerful bond that even death could not break.

From one perspective, The Brightness of Light is not a despairing story. But neither does it supply a facile, shallow hope. Rather, this performance left the audience to make sense of the emotional journey, to grapple with the mystery of human ties that bind. O’Keeffe finds solace in the Western sky. “It is wonderful,” Fleming sings as the music fades to silence.

Throughout this performance of The Brightness of Light, as well as with the Mozart works that opened the concert, Nelsons worked like a sculptor, effectively shaping the musical lines and details. He sensitively supplied all of the piece’s shattering power. In Mozart’s Symphony No. 36, Nelsons seesawed between terpsichorean zest and lyrical grace.

The overture to Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, taken at whip-crack pace, provided another moment of light. Conducting Mozart may not be among Nelsons’s greatest strengths, but in this go-round he was smart to allow the lines to flow smoothly without letting them bog down in Technicolor flourishes. The result was a zesty mix of lyricism and vitality. And that’s just what’s needed to polish Mozart to a bright shine.

Aaron Keebaugh has been a classical music critic in Boston since 2012. His work has been featured in the Musical Times, Corymbus, Boston Classical Review, Early Music America, and BBC Radio 3. A musicologist, he teaches at North Shore Community College in both Danvers and Lynn.