'The Hours' – New Opera at the Met

 

“ADAPTATION OF ‘THE HOURS’ BECOMES OPERA EVENT OF THE YEAR”
by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport 

[The Hours, a new opera in English composed by Kevin Puts (b. 1972), with a libretto by Greg Pierce (b. 1978), playwright, lyricist, and fiction writer, opened in a fully staged production at the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday, 22 November. 

[Pierce’s libretto was based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel by Michael Cunningham (b. 1952), which was also adapted in 2002 for the Academy Award-winning film of the same title.  Cunningham, in turn, drew on Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel (whose working title was The Hours), which Woolf (1882-1941) is writing in Cunningham’s story. 

[The Met’s production of The Hours is scheduled to run through 15 December.  It follows on the opera’s concert première performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, Philadelphia, Friday and Sunday, 18 and 20 March.

[The report below, broadcast on the PBS Newshour on 22 November, makes some interesting points about the theatrical differences in storytelling technique among the media of the stage, the novel, and film on which opera can draw.  Correspondent Jeffrey Brown also gets Québécois conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin to talk about working on new material with a living composer (as opposed to the classic operas whose composers are long dead).]

Judy Woodruff:  One day in the lives of three women from three different times and places brought together on stage through the magic of opera.

“The Hours” is a new work opening tonight on one of the world’s biggest stages, the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Jeffrey Brown reports for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown: The real-life English writer Virginia Woolf in 1923 in a suburb of London. Sung by Joyce DiDonato, she fights the demons in her head as she struggles with an idea for a novel.

Laura Brown, sung by Kelli O’Hara, a fictional housewife in 1949 Los Angeles barely surviving a sense of meaninglessness to her life. And Clarissa Ward in New York City at the end of the 20th century on a day her dear friend dying of AIDS will take his life, and she will contemplate the course of her own, sung by soprano Renee Fleming.

Renee Fleming, Opera Singer: You have got an incredibly interesting story about three women from different periods and their complicated lives, their sexuality, their — there’s suicide, there’s mental health, there’s pretty much everything in it.

And opera can do this without any problem, kind of taking three different periods and putting them together, because it’s the music that connects everything.

Jeffrey Brown: The music is by 50-year-old Kevin Puts. And days before opening, he was intently watching and listening at a rehearsal.

This is his fourth opera. The first, “Silent Night,” won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize [world première: Ordway Theater, Saint Paul, Minnesota, 2011]. In “The Hours,” he’s worked with librettist Greg Pierce to adapt the 1998 novel by Michael Cunningham, also a Pulitzer winner, which was made into a star-studded film four years later by director Stephen Daldry, and which itself was inspired by Virginia Woolf’s classic 1925 novel, “Mrs. Dalloway.”

For lovers of different art forms novels, films, operas, it offers a way into thinking about what each can do. With opera, two characters from different times can share the stage and sing with, almost to, one another.

For Puts, who’s composed everything from solo to orchestral music as well, this taps into his love of large-scale storytelling.

Kevin Puts, Composer: It’s that I love storytelling in music. I love evoking certain things, emotions, situations through music. I think that’s the kind of most amazing thing that music can do, to first introduce the three stories of “The Hours” and sort of establish different musics for each of those, and then gradually begin to blur the lines between them and have them overlap in a way that only music can.

Yannick Nezet-Seguin, Metropolitan Opera Conductor: Bringing new opera is my passion.

Jeffrey Brown: Met opera conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin says he loves the collaborative aspect of opera, especially when he can work with a living composer.

Yannick Nezet-Seguin: We play so many dead ones.

(LAUGHTER)

Yannick Nezet-Seguin: We play so many Mozart and so many Verdi operas and so many Wagner operas.

Jeffrey Brown: You’re not knocking Mozart and Verdi are you?

Yannick Nezet-Seguin: No, I love them. But, sometimes, you — oh, you wish that you would be able to ask them questions.

And, often, I make a joke with the orchestra. I say, one day, I’m going to ask Verdi, is it in heaven or in hell? I don’t know. But I’m going to ask Verdi what he means, but hopefully not too soon. Now we have Kevin Puts. We have Greg Pierce. They’re here. And we’re reminded how the music that’s written, especially in opera, is a living element.

Jeffrey Brown: Opera as a living art form, and one that can engage contemporary issues.

Renee Fleming: Every time I work on a new piece with a composer, I say, listen I want to sing words that are relevant to me in my life, that sound like I could be singing them and should be singing them.

Jeffrey Brown: You, Renee Fleming.

Renee Fleming: Exactly. At this stage of my life, I said, I want to sing something that means something to me.

Jeffrey Brown: In “The Hours,” Renee Fleming saw it, a story of women as artists, friends, lovers, mothers. Here, it’s the smallest pieces of daily life, buying flowers, for example, that somehow raise the biggest questions about life itself.

Underlying all of this, the knowledge that the real Virginia Woolf would take her own life in 1941 at age 59.

Renee Fleming: Every single person who’s in this opera has a really interesting role and a tale to tell. And the stories are relevant. We’re in a mental health crisis in this country that is — in the world, actually, that is unprecedented certainly in my lifetime.

And I fear for young people, and especially because it’s hitting them so hard.

Yannick Nezet-Seguin: If the audience recognizes themselves on stage, they’re going to relate to the story.

I believe that this then can bring more people to the opera, not just because we want to have more people in our seats, but because we believe in the mission of opera, that is, to convey those messages and collectively have a cathartic experience that can give us hope.

Jeffrey Brown: Kevin Puts, who also teaches at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore [a private music conservatory and preparatory school associated with Johns Hopkins University], says tapping into that mission and the contemporary possibilities for opera is attracting a new generation of composers.

Kevin Puts: The fact that so much new opera is happening in this country, not only at the Metropolitan Opera, but in companies all over the country, my students all want to write operas. When I was a student, I had no interest in doing that, because I thought, well, who’s going to perform it?

Maybe I will write an orchestra piece and try to get an orchestra. Even that would be difficult.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes.

Kevin Puts: But, these days, it’s a real possibility.

Jeffrey Brown: At opera’s end, in a gorgeous trio, Puts shows what opera can do, finally bringing the three women fully together, the hours of one day, three lives.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Judy Woodruff: All I can say is wow.

[In his more than 30-year career with the NewsHour, Jeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe.  As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world's leading writers, musicians, actors and other artists.  Among his signature works at the NewsHour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the NewsHour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.

[Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Coordinating Producer of CANVAS at PBS NewsHour.]

*  *  *  *
“GRAND VOICES, UNITED AND APART”
by Zachary Woolfe 

[Below is the New York Times review of the Philadelphia concert début of The Hours, which ran on 21 March in Section C (“Arts”) of the paper.  Following this notice is a review of the Metropolitan Opera’s première production of the opera in New York from a website devoted to opera.  I was going to post the Times’ review of the Met production, but as the writer was the same one who wrote this review, I thought it would be more interesting to see someone else’s opinion.

[For anyone interested in Zachary Woolfe’s assessment of the fully staged opera at the Met, his review ran on 24 November in the print edition (Section C) and was posted online on 23 November at Review: Renée Fleming Stars in ‘The Hours’ at the Met Opera - The New York Times (nytimes.com).]

Kevin Puts’s new opera had its premiere in a Philadelphia Orchestra concert presentation before coming to New York this fall.

PHILADELPHIA — Three women are left alone onstage.

The orchestra is low as they begin to sing. Their voices (two soprano, one mezzo-soprano) gradually swell and intertwine in a radiant, aching trio about all that separates them from one another — and their essential union.

This is, famously, the ending of [Richard] Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” [1911], which five years ago was the last work the superstar soprano Renée Fleming sang at the Metropolitan Opera. But her performance, a farewell to the canonical repertory, did not mark a full retirement. Fleming said she would continue to concertize, and left open the possibility of returning to staged opera for new pieces written with her in mind.

So on Friday here in Philadelphia, it felt like a moving nod to her distinguished career that a radiant, aching trio of women (two sopranos, one mezzo) left alone onstage — a trio about all that separates them from one another, and their essential union — is also the coda to “The Hours,” which will bring Fleming, for whom it was composed, back to the Met this fall.

There the work, Kevin Puts’s new adaptation of the 1998 novel and 2002 film about the reverberations of Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” in the lives of three characters in different places and eras, will be conducted by the company’s music director [since the 2020–2021 season], Yannick Nézet-Séguin. And on Friday, at the Kimmel Center, Nézet-Séguin led its world premiere in a concert presentation with another ensemble he leads, the Philadelphia Orchestra.

With a libretto by Greg Pierce, “The Hours” is even prettier and more sumptuous than “Silent Night,” a grandly scored yet sweetly humble opera about a cease-fire over Christmas during World War I, for which Puts won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012. The new work is, like “Silent Night,” direct, effective theater, with a cinematic quality in its plush, propulsive underscoring, its instinctive sense for using music to move things along. For all its shifts and overlaps of time and place, it’s an entirely clear piece, its sound world never too busy or difficult — never too interesting, perhaps — to muddy the waters.

Fleming has the role Meryl Streep played in Stephen Daldry’s film: Clarissa Vaughan, a prosperous book editor in late 1990s New York City who is preparing a party for her friend, a famous poet dying of AIDS. She suffers regrets and despair, as do other two women: Laura Brown (the acclaimed Broadway soprano Kelli O’Hara), a Los Angeles housewife in 1949; and Woolf herself (the mezzo Jennifer Johnson Cano on Friday, but Joyce DiDonato at the Met) in a London suburb, trying to surmount her depression long enough to write “Mrs. Dalloway” in the early 1920s.

In Michael Cunningham’s delicate novel, these three are linked in a carefully wrought knit of Woolfian prose and coincidences, among them that Clarissa Vaughan shares a first name with the title character of “Mrs. Dalloway,” who in Woolf’s novel — which Laura Brown is reading as she fights anomie and the urge toward suicide — is also making a party.

The film version is far more lugubrious, not least in Philip Glass’s melodramatically undulating score, which so defines the movie’s mood — its dusky, urgent strings inseparable from Nicole Kidman’s Woolf and her puttied aquiline nose striding off to drown themselves — that there is something brave in another composer taking on this material.

Puts has gotten from Glass’s Minimalism a taste for using repeated figurations as a kind of sonic carpeting, but his repetitions are much less insistent. The opera begins in a watery blur, with a choir, sounding simultaneously floating and precise, chanting fragments of Woolf’s classic opening line: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

The events of the opera, as in the book and film, are studiedly modest, taking place in a single day. Clarissa goes to the florist, visits her dying friend, and muses on what her life would have been like had she not, years ago, broken off a budding romance with him. Woolf chats with her husband about page proofs, forms phrases and greets her sister’s family. Laura attempts to bake a cake for her husband’s birthday before escaping to a hotel to read alone.

With each of the two acts unfolding in an unbroken stream, Puts moves smoothly between parlando sung conversation and glowing lyrical flights. The stylization of opera allows him to bring his characters together in the same musical space, even if they are otherwise unaware of one another. So there are, for example, ravishing duets for Woolf and Laura, one in which they sing lines from “Mrs. Dalloway” in close harmony over trembling strings. Puts is acute in using the chorus, which will presumably be offstage in a full production, to convey further shadows of these women’s interior lives.

Prepared with remarkably limited rehearsal time for a two-hour work with a substantial cast, this was a lush yet transparent account of the score, performed with polish and commitment. The opera leans heavily on this orchestra’s storied opulent strings, as well as on its characterful winds and brasses, and precision at a large battery of percussion instruments (including a celesta, used frequently, in a cliché of dreaminess).

Puts’s work is attractive and skillful. Yet much of it, despite lots of activity and ostensible variety in the orchestra and among the singers, gives a sense of engulfing sameness of musical texture and vocal approach. The arias, if you set the words aside, are more or less interchangeable: pristinely soaring. The saturated orchestral colors recall Nelson Riddle’s symphonic pop arrangements and Samuel Barber’s gently reflective soprano monologue “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” But Riddle songs are just a couple of minutes long; “Knoxville,” about 15. Over a couple of hours, it’s lovely but wearying.

The ’50s style for Laura’s world — mild Lawrence Welk-type swing, choral writing like TV jingles — feels obvious. And some moments of highest drama smack of the overkill that mars the film, as when the threat of Woolf’s devastating headaches is marked by pummeling darkness, yawning brasses and instrumental screams.

New fantasy sequences, demarcated in concert with sudden shifts of lighting, telegraph a bit too crudely how much these women want to run from their lives. Woolf’s imaginary interaction with a contemporary male novelist who speaks about how much she’s meant to him — an invention of the libretto — is cloying and overwrought, drenched in bells.

The more intimate and understated, the better for Puts’s music, and the cast embodies both those qualities. Cano sings with mellow sobriety — and, in Woolf’s darkest moments, stricken intensity. O’Hara’s voice is silvery at the top and full in the middle, her pain registering gracefully.

As Clarissa’s poet friend, Richard, the baritone Brett Polegato sang with lightly sardonic airiness. The tenor William Burden sounded shining and eager as his old lover, Louis. The tenor Jamez McCorkle, the mezzo Deborah Nansteel and the bass-baritone Brandon Cedel were steady, sonorous presences as the main characters’ much put-upon romantic partners.

Fleming began with some paleness of tone, but grew in command through the evening, past her characteristic propriety to a kind of somber nobility. Clarissa dominates the opera’s final scenes, when “The Hours” is at its finest: the emotions sincere and persuasive, the music fervent.

And at the end, the three women come together, perceiving one another in a way they cannot in the novel or film and arriving at a simple moral: “Here is the world and you live in it, and you try.” There was poignancy in having a great diva, now 63, singing the nostalgic leading role, a woman taking in all she has done — and realizing she still has more to give.

[Zachary Woolfe has been the classical music editor of the New York Times since 2015.  He was previously the opera critic of the New York Observer.]

*  *  *  *
“METROPOLITAN OPERA 2022-23 REVIEW: THE HOURS”
by David Salazar

[David Salazar’s OperaWire notice of The Hours was posted on 23 November 2022 at Metropolitan Opera 2022-23 Review: The Hours - OperaWire).  OperaWire is an online source of daily news, reviews, and announcements of the international opera scene.  The site was founded in 2016 and is headquartered on New York City.]

Joyce DiDonato, Kyle Ketelsen, Kai Edgar Shines Amidst Kevin Puts’ Gorgeous Musical Tapestry

SPOILER & CONTENT WARNING: There will be a lot of spoilers for the plot details of this opera. There are also references to self-harm and suicide.

In 2012, Kevin Puts’s “Silent Night” won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. And following that victory, the opera, which premiered in Minnesota in 2011, seemingly toured all over the country getting performances at Arizona Opera, Utah Opera, Washington National Opera, Austin Opera, Opera San Jose, Philadelphia, Calgary, Kansas City, Fort Worth, and even in Ireland.

But somehow, it never arrived at the Met Opera (OperaWire did make a case for the work when the company announced that Yannick Nézet-Séguin would be taking over the music director position with a goal of bringing new opera). However, Kevin Puts has finally been given his shot in the limelight with his new opera “The Hours,” which received its staged world premiere on Nov. 22, 2022.

And he certainly did.

Vast Musical Tapestry

“The Hours” is a new opera by Puts and librettist Greg Pierce that tells three intersecting stories set across three different timelines. In New York City at the close of the 20^th century, Clarissa (Renée Fleming) is preparing a party to celebrate the life of his beloved friend Richard (Kyle Ketelsen). In Richmond, England in 1923, Virginia Woolf ponders her new novel and struggles with her inner demons. And finally in Los Angeles circa 1949, Laura Brown seemingly has it all – a loving husband, an adorable young son, and she’s pregnant. But she’s also struggling with her own sense of identity within these social strictures. The opera is based on the book by Michael Cunningham and the Academy Award-winning film by Stephen Daldry that starred Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, and Julianne Moore as Clarissa, Viriginia [sic], and Laura, respectively.

A work like this that spans time and space requires music that is seemingly flexible in its style and approach, something that Puts is quite adept at. As a composer Puts does not seem allergic to either melodic vocal writing or tonal harmonization, both of which he integrates throughout this opera in combination with a unique balance of styles.

The opening of the opera feels like a movie score with its propulsive and potent string sound and dissonances in the brass, followed by a chorus singing “The Flowers” in increasingly fragmented lines so as to create an echo that literally transcends time and the space. When we settle into Virginia Woolf’s world, the orchestration strips down to a simple piano accompaniment and a very delicate aural fabric that also spotlights Virginia’s inner struggles. When Laura comes on the scene, we initially get a swing-like choral passage and music that intersperses showtune-like melodies with others that harken to mid-20^th century cinema scores. Laura’s son Richie even sings a baroque tune halfway through the first act, furthering this mélange of music styles. At other times, we get sweeping vocal passages that draw from German romantics like Strauss and [Richard] Wagner, particularly major climactic passages. Some passages that stood out in this regard were Laura getting swept up in her emotions right before kissing her neighbor Kitty or Clarissa mourning the body of her beloved Richard after he commits suicide.  And almost everything Virginia Woolf [sings?] feels like one extended vocal passage.

What’s more, there’s a fantastic balance to be found between what is going on in the pit and onstage. A lot of modern opera, unfortunately, buries the singers behind intensely rhythmic recitative, barely allowing for the voice to do what it does best – SING. Instead, we get what often feels like quasi-plays (where the singing is but a mere effect to replace spoken dialogue) while the orchestra tells the story, often through intellectualized harmonic writing that feels aimed at impressing musicologists first, audience second. The result is often that the music and the experience and emotions it can generate become secondary, a soundtrack to the text rather than the center of the experience. It’s only when you digest it later on and really think about it that the structure and machine of it all makes sense and can even potentially be exciting. That isn’t to say that opera CAN’T be that (it should be that, but also more), but the in-the-moment experience never quite generates that immediacy of emotional connection and requires the viewer to do more work in retrospect.

Puts’ priorities are clearly different and there’s one passage in particular that stood out in this regard. It’s Richard’s final scene seconds before he jumps out the window to his death. The orchestra has a pleading melody. Richard isn’t singing the melody, but his line is in line rhythmically allowing for us to focus in on the intense emotional connection of the character through and with the music. You’re not just focused on the text and what it expresses, but how it is expressed through the music without having to think about it.

And to add to that sense of immediacy of connection with the viewer, Puts makes ample references and nods to other classic works throughout “The Hours.” Kathleen Kim’s Barbara sings the Queen of the Night’s famed high Fs from [“Der Hölle] Rache” [a soprano aria from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 1791 opera, The Magic Flute] during Clarissa’s meeting with her. At another moment, the violins seem to quote from one of the interludes of [Benjamin] Britten’s “Peter Grimes” [1945] and the opening of the second act has a subtly uncanny resemblance to a passage from Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.” There was also a Stravinskyesque use of winds during one scene as Laura struggles to get out of bed. And even if it isn’t a direct musical quotation, how can you not hear the final trio between two sopranos and a mezzo and not automatically think of the grand finale of “Der Rosenkavalier.”

The openness about the vastness musical canvas also has the impact of keeping the audience engaged throughout, waiting for how Puts will eventually put it all together.

And it’s crucial that he does because Pierce’s libretto, a monster undertaking for the opera stage, is a bit all over the place, literally. Pierce’s writing, while fascinating, can be quite ambiguous at times, shifting into abstraction and jumping from scene to scene in quick succession. It definitely ensures that a lot of stuff is happening at an unrelenting pace, but it makes the first half a bit indecipherable at times, and unless you’ve seen the movie or read the book, rather aimless in the sense that we don’t really know where it’s all headed from a dramatic standpoint. To be fair, there’s a lot of story to cover and a lot of characters to introduce (including the three leads) and in opera, where music takes up a lot of time to develop, setting these stages isn’t as simple as it is in film or literature.

But to that point, the opera’s ambition leads to overstuffing of characters, some of which feel a bit underwritten. Sally (Denyce Graves) feels rather prominently underwritten in comparison to such narrative counterparts as Leonard Woolf or Dan Brown (the couples of the other two leads); these two men themselves also are a bit one dimensional, though to be fair, in an opera centering women, it’s fair to see men get the treatment women got in stories for so long. But again, that’s what makes Sally, a LGBTQIA+ character in a work that has several LGBTQIA+ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning/queer, intersex, asexual, and anyone else who doesn’t fit the conventional binary gender taxonomy] characters, somewhat of a disappointment. Meanwhile, Vanessa, Virginia Woolf’s sister, barely registers as a character, in a crucial dramatic scene where Virginia seemingly threatens one of her nephews with impending doom. Same goes for Barbara, who gets a flirtatious scene with Clarissa that somehow rhymes with Laura’s with Kitty; however, whereas the latter has major dramatic and character implications for Laura’s story, Barbara’s scene, while fun musically, could probably be cut without affecting the dramatic momentum all that much.

The second half of the opera, which is also the shorter one, is admittedly far stronger in its narrative propulsion and in its emotional payoff, particularly in how it manages the death of Richard, the aftermath, and that final hopeful trio in which the heroines come together to contemplate how they must keep on trying to move forward in a difficult world.

Stage World of Possibilities

[Stage director] Phelim McDermott’s production is brilliant in how it takes the libretto’s structure, Puts’ musical interpretation, and then layers it with a similarly vast theatrical palette.

The meat of the production features panels that move on and off the stage, delineating several major locations: Clarissa’s NY apartment, Virginia’s studio, Richard’s apartment, Laura’s kitchen, and Laura’s bedroom. The majority of the scenes take place within those confines and it’s quite fascinating to notice certain parallels between the spaces and how they connect the characters. Laura’s bedroom is first introduced as an elevated platform, the first of such set in the opera, expressing her isolation, but also creating a precarious sensation for the viewer; with Laura constantly contemplating suicide, her set and its height foreshadows and connects with her son’s eventual suicide from the top of his building. Likewise, Richard’s apartment is also elevated on a platform, linking it with Laura’s initial room. Meanwhile, the other sets hue [sic; hew = ‘to conform’?] quite closely with one another. We see a kitchen for both Clarissa and Laura, while the dark brown of Clarissa’s apartment connects with the brown hues of Virginia’s studio.

But just as the music shifts from style to style, the set is also malleable. Anything seems possible as McDermott strips away the sets, drops a curtain, and projects a beach across it. Later on, the three main sets converge and the three leads (or at least Laura and Clarissa) switch locations, hinting at their eventual convergence at the close of the opera.

Then there’s the use of the dancers, who serve a similar function as the chorus, in that they not only serve the action directly, but also abstractly and emotionally. At the start of Act two, with Laura contemplating suicide, the dancers hold pillows seemingly mimicking or counterpointing her emotions. In another scene, they uncomfortably surround Virginia Woolf. At another moment, they cause chaos in the kitchen, spotlighting Laura’s emotional distress. Near the end of the opera, they zip around her for a wardrobe change before whisking her away into the future for her meeting with Clarissa.

Even if the integration of so many elements can result in chaotic viewing at times, most of it is so well-staged and coordinated that it doesn’t detract but adds to the action. If some of the libretto feels confusing at times, the stage magic more than makes up for it and even clarifies it.

Three Divas, One Shining Star

The lead up to this production centered on the three women headlining the opera – Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara, and Joyce DiDonato.

For Fleming this was a homecoming following her Met “retirement” a few seasons back in a production of “Der Rosenkavalier.” And her first appearance, it was clear that the audience at the Met was excited to have her back. It hasn’t been that many years, but for those who forgot, Fleming immediately set out to remind audiences of her spellbinding vocal abilities throughout the night. Paired with impeccable diction throughout the evening, her ample vibrato served to express the nerves and unease that Clarissa feels throughout as she ponders whether Richard will attend the party or whether he is okay. Her standout moment came, without a doubt, in that final encounter with Richard. As she implored him to get down from the ledge, her soprano grew more accented, her singing more desperate in its intensity. And in the following scene, where she finds him on the ground, dead, she delivered some searing legato singing, her voice weeping beautifully.

If there was anything potentially disappointing in Fleming’s turn as Clarissa, it was that outside of her relationship with Richard, there was a lack of depth in the other interactions. Part of that is on the libretto (the Barbara scene), but some of it was how Fleming interacted with everyone in quite the same manner. While one might understand a certain withdrawn feeling toward Sally, it didn’t feel like there was any real connection between her and Denyce Graves (making the repeated use of “Babe” rather grating; it just sounds weird in an opera). The scene with Barbara, which is supposed to be flirtatious, didn’t quite soar, again because Fleming felt a bit disengaged. I bring this up because Clarissa’s narrative features the most character interactions and she carries the weight of making each one feel unique and different. It unfortunately didn’t feel that way.

This was further amplified by the performances of her other two co-leads. O’Hara didn’t have to move about the stage as much with a lot of her scenes locking her down either on a bed, or in her kitchen, but there was a razor-sharp focus in how her body language, as minimal as it was, communicated the despair she was feeling. Whether it be how she lay on the bed in the opening scene, or how she frozen in that very same space as she pondered suicide, or how she gently caressed her son in one scene or the stern expression she gave him in another, O’Hara’s Laura was always alive and full of intense emotions.

It helped overcome some vocal shortcomings that cropped up here and there. O’Hara sounded a bit small during her opening lines, but that might have been a function of how far back and elevated she was on stage. But eventually, her voice became more present and resonant as the night developed. Her high notes could feel a bit forced and shrill, particularly at the beginning, but as she warmed into the role they also started to brighten and cut cleanly. Without a doubt, her big moment was the opening of Act two where she contemplates suicide, her delicate singing drawing us as she read a passage from Virginia’s book. When she was later joined by Joyce DiDonato’s, the two singers blended beautifully in one of the most arresting musical cues of the entire evening (the orchestration here, with a rich bass in the strings created a sense of tension and warmth all at once).

And that brings us to Joyce DiDonato, who was the undisputed star of the night, as Virginia Woolf. The mezzo was last heard at the Met Opera in 2020 in the title role of “Agrippina” [1709 opera by George Frideric Handel] and she has been a fixture with the company in a wide range of repertory. But something about this performance struck differently. From her opening and highly exposed monologue, accompanied only by piano, DiDonato’s voice had a roundness that I hadn’t heard before, a freedom that allowed her to sculpt long lines with unparalleled warmth and elegance. Even her high note vibrato, which has always had a unique quality and color that could often feel a bit disconnected from the rest of her registers, blossomed more organically from the thicker core. That opening monologue might have been the first instance in the opera where I felt that Puts’ vocal writing had taken flight. Virtually every scene with Virginia features this kind of beautiful vocal writing, allowing DiDonato’s rich mezzo to take flight.

But Virginia wasn’t just about soaring vocal lines. In between, DiDonato delivered some incredible comic and dramatic moments. When asked to have breakfast by her husband and put something in her stomach, few people could respond with the intensity and sarcasm that DiDonato managed as she noted that she had some coffee and almonds in her stomach. Or when Nelly offers to serve her more food later in the work, she was menacing as she shut her down and demanded that they stop trying to force-feed her. Even in more contentious encounters where her husband Leonard, DiDonato’s mezzo shifted from more aggressive and leaner to slenderer and more tender. Another standout interaction was with her niece and nephews as she cuddles them, her singing sprightly before her mind and singing shifted into a darker mode as she pronounced the death of Septimus, all while menacingly pointing at her nephew.

And in the final trio, where the three artists managed some beautiful lyrical moments together, it was DiDonato’s grounded sound that gave the passage its depth and warmth.

The Main Men

While this is an opera about women, men do play an important role, none more notable than that of Richard, the man that Clarissa is hoping to save. Taking on this intense role was Kyle Ketelsen who also stole every scene he was in. We first meet Richard in his apartment, pale, broken, and despairing. Ketelsen’s voice, hard-edged and accented, snarled and barked at Clarissa, emphasizing his state of mind; his darker, rugged sound contrasted wonderfully with Fleming’s brighter color. He also stayed mostly rooted to the sofa, his body language transmitting this sense of defeat. Ketelsen returns a few scenes later in a flashback, sporting a red shirt, his singing far more full-bodied, brighter in color, and more fluid in line. Standing tall and firm, there was also a looseness in his body language that allowed us to see the Richard that once was, adding to the pain of watching the man he has become.

And that’s what made his final scene arguably the most potent of the entire opera. Sitting by the ledge as Clarissa enters, Ketelsen’s Richard engaged in a game of cat and mouse, moving from window to window, despite Clarissa’s constant pleas. At one point, as he lamented not knowing what to do with the hours coming his way, his voice melted into a weep, a devastating moment that really expressed the existential crisis that he was at odds with. If in his first scene he sounded bitter and aggressive, here his baritone, noticeably softer in timbre, was full of pain but also acceptance. In that pivotal moment, Ketelsen simply let his body drop, adding to the pain of the moment. Puts, in another one of his finest moments, scores this with a gentle suspended chord, where other composers would have gone for a bombastic dissonant orchestral explosion. That musical cliché automatically hijacks a tragic moment like this, pulling the listener into the aural maelstrom, leaving the tragic moment behind. But Puts’ choice lends this moment greater intimacy for the listener, allowing them to truly process what is going on before letting the despair set in with a choral explosion.

Another standout performance came from Kai Edgar, all of 11-years-old, in the role of Richie. Credit to Puts for giving such an ample role to a child performer, but even more so to Edgar who looked unfazed on the Met stage as he sang throughout the night with confidence. He even gets a solo, the aforementioned baroque tune, that he managed quite well. But he didn’t just have to sing – at moments, the opera actually probes the young boy’s emotions as he asks his mother straight up if she went to the hospital, Edgar’s eyes searching for O’Hara’s in what resulted in a truly gut-wrenching moment.

Sean Panikkar delivered a warm tenor as Leonard Woolf, giving his character warmth. There were hints of despair and agitation with Virginia, but Panikkar, whose body language was gentle and fluid, made Leonard out to be a more supportive figure.

Bass-baritone Brandon Cedel provided an interesting counterpart as Laura’s husband Dan Brown. Where Pannikkar was concerned, Cedel’s Dan was completely sunny and unflustered, his voice relishing every line; few can sing the word “Fantabulous” with that much gusto and keep a straight-face.

Strong Support

John Holiday played the Man under the Arch, a spirit-like presence that, with the exception of one scene, sang intermezzo-like vocalizes throughout. Holiday’s countertenor is quite beautiful in its texture, sounding free but also resonating quite potently in the Met. I don’t think I’ve quite heard any countertenor singing at the Met, blossom with such depth and volume as Holiday does. Again, his passages were other examples of Puts’ ability to write some glorious lines for the voice.

Sylvia D’Eramo appeared in two scenes as Kitty and then Vanessa. While Vanessa was not a particularly potent presence in the overall fabric of the work, her Kitty more than delivered. From her very first entrance as Kitty, she delivered a potent and dark soprano that contrasted nicely with the O’Hara’s softer timbre. She moved about the stage as if she owned it, immediately allowing the audience to see and feel why Laura might have interest in her. In addition to the authority was a more playful and flirtatious side, which further intensified the encounter, allowing for the sudden kiss at its apex to deliver. But right after that moment, D’Eramo, utilized a darker texture to ask Laura for a favor, adding tension to the scene.

Kathleen Kim, always a scene stealer, delivered vocal fireworks with her Queen of the Night passages as Barbara, while somehow sounding worlds different as Mrs. Latch. Whereas Barbara was characterized with unrestrained vocal brightness and pop, Mrs. Latch was softer and drier in timbre.

As Sally, Denyce Graves’ ample mezzo, even with its unwieldy vibrato, had presence and strength, which added to the frustration that she wasn’t given more to do than to try and get Clarissa’s attention.

Tony Stevensen as Walter, William Burden as Louis, Lena Josephine Marano as Angelica, Atticus Ware as Julian, and Patrick Scott McDermott as Quentin filled in well in their respective roles.

Finally at the Met

It’s been largely underwritten how two months in, the Met Opera’s music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin had yet to lead the company in any opera, especially when you consider how the past year he canceled his participation a production [Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro in January] and also withdrew from the end of another run of [Giuseppe Verdi’s 1867 opera] “Don Carlo,” even skipping out on the HD performance [a series of live movie theater transmissions of opera performances]. But here he was, finally making his very first appearance of the 2022-23 season. In this case it was better late than never.

As per usual, the Met Opera music director, who cuts frustratingly inconsistent form in repertory staples, excels in modern works. From the opening notes of this production, it was clear that he was in complete control of the Met Opera orchestra. He seemed quite attuned to his soloists throughout the night, ensuring that they always cut cleanly over the orchestra; even at the most potent fortissimo climaxes, the voices were always clear amidst the texture. Engaging with a new work for the first time can be a major challenge unless the person in the pit is able to deliver through with clarity and concision; there’s no doubt that (based on all I was able to write about the score in this review), Nézet-Séguin managed exactly that throughout the evening. He’s also set to conduct “Champion” [2013 opera with music by Terence Blanchard and a libretto by Michael Cristofer] later this season [April 2023], which given his track record with newer works, generates anticipation for that production as well.

For those familiar with the numerous reviews I have written already this season, this is going to sound like a broken record. But the truth is, the 2022-23 season is shaping up to be one of the best the Met Opera has produced in some time. You can add “The Hours” to the list of must-see operas this season.

[David Salazar is the Editor-in-Chief for OperaWire and is one of its co-creators.  In addition to writing reviews and interviews, he also heads the weekly Opera Meets Film articles and Opera Quizzes.  Prior to creating OperaWire, Salazar worked as an entertainment reporter for Latin Post, an online media company that serves the Latino population in the United States with informative and innovative news, where he interviewed opera stars and was chief opera critic.  He’s also a violinist who performed as concertmaster with several youth and university orchestras at major venues around New York, including Alice Tully Hall and Carnegie Hall.] 

*  *  *  *
“‘DESIGNING THE WOMEN OF ‘THE HOURS’ FOR THE OPERA”
by Louis Lucero II

[This article on the costume designs for the Met’s production of Puts’s The Hours appeared in the New York Times on 27 November 2022 in the “Sunday Styles” Section.  I’m posting it simply because I thought it was an interesting read—and there’s almost nothing more theatrical in a play or an opera than the costumes!

[The article was accompanied by some wonderful illustrations of the costume renderings and photos of the finished dress—all the costumes in the article are for the lead women.  I didn’t reproduce them for Rick On Theater because adding illustrations is a hassle on Blogger, but the online version of the story has the same pictures for anyone interested: Costuming ‘The Hours’ at the Met: Vintage Wallpaper and ’90s Calvin Klein - The New York Times (nytimes.com).]

While creating the costumes for a new opera adaptation of “The Hours,” a designer found inspiration in archival wallpaper, an English farmhouse and 1990s Calvin Klein.

When the British designer Tom Pye was first brought on to the creative team of “The Hours,” a new opera by Kevin Puts that had its premiere at the Met on Tuesday, it was just for the sets.

But that was before he learned that the opera, like the 2002 movie inspired by the same Michael Cunningham novel, had pulled out all the stops when it came to filling the principal roles: three women strewn across the 20th century whose fates seem united by a mysterious connection to Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway.” In Joyce DiDonato, the Met found its Virginia; in Kelli O’Hara, its despairing midcentury homemaker Laura Brown; and in Renée Fleming, its high-powered Manhattanite book editor Clarissa Vaughan.

“When I heard the castings, I was like, ‘I’m doing the costumes as well,’” Mr. Pye said.

Although he “loved it when it came out,” Mr. Pye, 54, had scrupulously avoided the film, which received an Academy Award nomination for Ann Roth’s costume design.

“It can be really distracting, if you’re trying to design and find your own image for everything,” he said.

In a recent interview, he explained his vision for the three women at the heart of “The Hours.”

Virginia: ‘Mustards and Burnt Oranges and Olive Greens’

While adapting Mr. Cunningham’s sprawling, multigenerational story for the stage, one objective quickly became clear: to help the audience not lose track of who’s doing what where — and in which decade.

“In the book, it’s very ‘one chapter, one chapter, one chapter,’” Mr. Pye said, referring to the episodic structure of Mr. Cunningham’s novel. “In the film, they get to play a bit more, and this is like five times more.”

Knowing there would often be several characters singing onstage at the same time made Mr. Pye want to be “as simple and direct” as possible.

“So I’ve been very, very clear — or, I’m trying to be very, very clear — in the color palettes and the worlds of the costume and the sets,” Mr. Pye said, “so that you know you’re in Virginia’s world, you know you’re in Laura’s world, so that even if the singer doesn’t stand exactly in her world, her color palette follows her, and she can be free onstage to be a little bit more complex.”

To create a coherent palette that would follow Virginia throughout the performance, Mr. Pye looked to the Bloomsbury group, an informal collective of thinkers and artists, so named for the bohemian London neighborhood many of them called home.

The real-life Virginia Woolf and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, belonged to the group, which had “a really specific palette,” Mr. Pye said, pointing to the work of Bell and Duncan Grant, a fellow painter she took up with in a Sussex farmhouse called Charleston. “You see these sort of tertiary colors — mustards and burnt oranges and olive greens.”

Laura: ‘The Opposite of Virginia’

If audiences are meant to associate Virginia with the autumnal and the earthbound — “natural pigments that you believe could be made from natural products,” as Mr. Pye put it — the character of Laura occupies a completely different wedge of the color wheel.

“There’s nothing natural going on there,” he said.

For Laura’s palette, Mr. Pye took inspiration from Technicolor in an effort to project postwar optimism. “They’re not normal colors,” he said, comparing them instead to Cadillacs and 1950s diners. “They’re all quite man-made, manufactured — the opposite of Virginia.”

Clarissa: ‘Go as Simple as We Can’

To outfit the character of Clarissa, a professional woman living in Manhattan at the end of the last century, Mr. Pye drew on his own memories of the late 1990s, including some of his first jobs in New York theater. He was mostly doing sets then, he recalled, which at the time meant a lot of glass walls, glass boxes and “reclaimed everything.”

“All we ever did back then was minimalism,” he said. “It was lots of empty stages.”

“I was looking at Calvin Klein, and Donna Karan, and all those great designers that were working then, and it’s so minimalist in the color palettes,” Mr. Pye added.

According to Mr. Pye, the 1990s sensibility was defined by an instinct to pare down: “‘Let’s strip everything back, let’s go as simple as we can,’” he said. “So that’s what I’ve done with Clarissa.”

Wearing white and often standing before a plain wall, Clarissa frequently functions as a sort of monochrome barrier between the more colorful worlds of Virginia (stage left) and Laura (stage right). To Mr. Pye, there was something satisfying about the overall visual effect.

“There’s a purity in that, and a modernity in it,” he said.

The Roses

The famous first sentence of “Mrs. Dalloway,” Virginia Woolf’s landmark novel that forms the spiritual backbone of “The Hours,” contains a clue to the opera’s signature motif: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

Clarissa also begins her day with a trip to a flower shop, where she buys roses (herself). Seizing on that connective thread, Mr. Pye spied an opportunity to make the theme of roses “echo, and sort of bounce down the decades.”

“Both Laura and Virginia are wearing rose prints, but I wanted them to be complete opposite ends,” he said. To create the pattern on both Virginia’s and Laura’s dresses, he turned to wallpaper, not textiles, from their periods. For Virginia, he found two promising options, both from the 1920s, in a Smithsonian digital archive.

“I liked the roses on one and the background on another, so I pulled them together and changed every single color,” Mr. Pye said. The result is a custom-printed fabric that, while not vintage in the traditional sense, is nonetheless “very, very ’20s” in spirit. In contrast with the “quite tight, very Deco” florals of Virginia’s dress, Laura’s own “very ’50s” pattern was adapted from a Sanderson wallpaper and features big, splashy roses.

The Silhouettes

The three women of “The Hours” are also distinguished by their costumes’ silhouettes — no two quite alike, and each a reflection of its decade.

The dropped-waist silk dress Mr. Pye created for Virginia would have been a familiar style in the 1920s, with a relaxed feel befitting a woman living and writing in the countryside. “I wanted it to be soft and to have movement,” he said, adding, “the Bloomsbury group were all artists, so it didn’t want to feel too structured.”

There’s a certain postwar extravagance to Laura’s look: With wartime privations largely a memory, a woman like Laura could enjoy a skirt that was full for fullness’s sake. “Suddenly, it’s: ‘Let’s use five times as much fabric as we need to make a skirt, just to enjoy the opulence of that,’” Mr. Pye said.

The nipped-in waist and voluminous skirt of Laura’s house dress hark back to an hourglass silhouette innovated by Christian Dior: “It was that famous Dior dress — the white jacket and the big, full skirt — that was really radical after the ’40s, and after the war. Suddenly we’re going back to something more optimistic.”

For Clarissa, each detail seems to communicate ease and confidence — the rolled-up sleeves, the functional pockets of her skirt.

“There’s certainly a bit of that ’80s power dressing that would’ve continued into the ’90s, particularly for a woman of her status,” Mr. Pye said.

In early conceptions of the character’s costume, Clarissa wore pants. But Ms. Fleming wasn’t crazy about the idea, Mr. Pye said, and it was ultimately dismissed as a bit too on-the-nose.

“This feels stronger,” he said.

[Louis Locero II joined the New York Times Style Section as a senior staff editor in April.  Previously, he covered breaking news for the last four years on the Express team.]