By Ralph P. Locke

When the front page of the newspaper is getting me down, I can feel at least somewhat buoyed by remembering that we live in a world that can produce such profoundly touching and empathetic works of art as Kevin Puts’s The Hours.

The Hours, music by Kevin Puts and a libretto by Greg Pierce, based on Michael Cunningham’s novel.

Joyce DiDonato, Kelli O’Hara, Renée Fleming, Kathleen Kim, Denyce Graves, Sean Panikkar, Tony Stevenson, William Burden, and others.

Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus/ Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

Erato 5054197910524 [2 CDs] 143 minutes.

To purchase or try any track, click here.

Opera lovers have been reading about, and hearing, and even seeing, if they’re lucky, Kevin Puts’s 2022 opera The Hours. I say “seeing” because it got a concert premiere with the Philadelphia Orchestra and then became a roaring success in its stage performances at the Met in New York City (that same year, and then in this past season with nearly all the same performers).

One of those performances was transmitted in high-definition to movie theaters and on the radio, and here that performance is offered to us in audio-only form. I certainly hope that a DVD will eventually come out, so we can savor the singers’ gestures and facial expressions, and what sounds like a production that was inventive without spilling over into directorial self-indulgence. But don’t let that stop you now: this is a major opera, worth getting to know in a variety of ways and for a variety of good reasons. (I listened intently to the first radio broadcast, and then to the one from this past season as well.)

Most of all, Puts, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for his opera Silent Night (a work about a famous battlefield moment in World War I, and one that has gone on to have numerous productions) is on his best form here, transmuting into pure operatic gold the three interwoven stories that Michael Cunningham told in his bestselling, and Pulitzer-winning, novel The Hours (1998) and that then became the basis for a first-rate movie starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep (2002). The clear yet richly resonant libretto is by playwright Greg Pierce.

The opera (like the story’s previous two incarnations as a novel and a film) has three plots, in each of which a central female protagonist goes through a crisis that relates, in some way, to Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. For simplicity, I will discuss them in chronological order, though the stories interweave throughout the work.

Briefly, in 1923 Virginia Woolf (in Richmond, England) is struggling to write her (later renowned) novel Mrs. Dalloway and is also having fantasies about committing suicide; in 1949 (in Los Angeles), Laura Brown is becoming depressed about marriage and motherhood and is reading Woolf’s novel; and in the 1990s (in New York City) book editor Clarissa Vaughan is trying to help her novelist-friend Richard, who is dying of AIDS, keep dark thoughts at bay and come to the party that she has organized in honor of an award he has just won. Among other things, Clarissa buys flowers for the party, thereby echoing unawares the famous opening sentence of Woolf’s novel. (Richard tauntingly calls Clarissa her Mrs. Dalloway.)

As the excellent booklet-essays by Christopher Browner and composer Kevin Puts make clear, one of the many things that make opera so special as a genre is that it allows people to sing simultaneously and for the orchestra to comment further. Thus, Greg Pierce has taken care to craft moments where two characters in different eras (and thus different small “sets” on stage) join their voices without knowing it, sometimes even uttering the same word or words. This process reaches a climax near the end of the opera, when all three women step closer to each other (though presumably don’t quite see each other) and launch a stunning trio indebted to the trio for three women near the end of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. That the opera should include a trio at this point was one of many suggestions that Renée Fleming — who is renowned for her many performances of Strauss’s Marschallin in Rosenkavalier — made to Puts and that he was happy to take and run with!

Kelli O’Hara, Renée Fleming, and Denyce Graves in Kevin Puts’s The Hours Photo: Evan Zimmerman / Met Opera

The opera is very cannily crafted, with the orchestra being drastically reduced (e.g., two solo wind instruments, or just a high long note in the violins) while the characters sing, and then welling up in richly colored waves when the singers go silent. The chorus has a big role, often sharing the unspoken thoughts of a character, or thoughts that she or he will utter later, or different versions (being pondered by Woolf) of the first sentence of Mrs. Dalloway.

We get to know these three women, care about them, want to shake them, reassure them…. We also meet other interesting characters: Woolf’s husband Leonard, Woolf’s sister (the painter Vanessa Bell), Laura’s son Richie, the editor Clarissa’s novelist-client Richard (who we gradually realize is Richie, now grown up), Richard’s former lover Louis, and Clarissa’s life-partner Sally. Smaller characters recur, sometimes two of them sung by the same singer. Kathleen Kim, a renowned coloratura at the Met, is both the florist Barbara and Richie’s baby sitter Mrs. Latch.

Which brings us to the singers: what an amazing roster! I’ve listed the three main female soloists in the header in “chronological” order: mezzo Joyce DiDonato is Virginia Woolf, bright soprano and Broadway star Kelli O’Hara is Laura Brown, and Renée Fleming is Richard’s editor, Clarissa Vaughan. All no doubt came through vividly on stage. (DiDonato and O’Hara are particularly experienced, canny actors, and Fleming, too, knows how to hold audience’s attention even without opening her mouth.) In purely vocal terms, Fleming wins the prize here, perhaps because (as we have been told in articles and interviews) the role was so carefully tailored to her voice. At age 63, she sounds as steady and luscious as ever, and her words come through tellingly, especially in the interchanges with the impressive, somewhat scary Kyle Ketelsen (as Richard).

The smaller roles are cast from strength, my favorite perhaps being William Burden as Louis, though his tone is getting a little frayed now at the top, whereas it was clarion when I heard him in operas by Mozart and Britten at Glimmerglass years ago. Sean Panikkar, who was glorious when I heard him in works by Weill (at Glimmerglass) and Mozart (in Pittsburgh), has likewise lost some sweetness at the top. But he conveys well Leonard Woolf’s desperate concern for Virginia’s mental stability.

Composer Kevin Puts. Photo: courtesy of the artist

The music in which Puts wraps all these wonderful singers is multi-hued, and one could write quite an article tracing the various stylistic borrowings. Barbara the florist offers delectable coloratura that includes instantly recognizable snippets from Mozart’s Queen of the Night and Papagena.

But the parallels are usually not that specific. I was reminded at times (but maybe it’s just me) of atmospheric moments in Britten’s Peter Grimes and Barber’s Knoxville, Summer of 1915. In Laura’s scenes, there’s jazzy big-band stuff. Sometimes a vocal phrase will transfer to the orchestra, where it is submitted to some dissonant development suggesting an agonizing emotional undercurrent. At such moments, I felt that Puts may have been thinking of a few memorable spots in Bernstein’s underrated A Quiet Place, a work that I discuss in a chapter in the recently published book Leonard Bernstein in Context (edited by Elizabeth A. Wells).

As the work goes on, it sounds less and less like a catalogue of borrowings or tributes and more like a work with its own fierce integrity. I predict a long life for it, and I thank Erato for bringing us this audio release (while still begging for a DVD eventually! — in the meantime, selected short scenes can be viewed online).

I wish that the booklet had contained a printed libretto. But I was mostly able to make out the words (especially when listening with earphones), thanks in large part to the exquisite command of the various singers and the skill of the Met’s audio engineers. The orchestra, chorus, and conducting all operate at an a consistently high level, as we have come to expect from the Met in recent decades.

I can feel at least somewhat buoyed by remembering that we live in a world that can produce such profoundly touching and empathetic works of art as Kevin Puts’s The Hours.

Ralph P. Locke is emeritus professor of musicology at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. Six of his articles have won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music. His most recent two books are Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections and Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart (both Cambridge University Press). Both are now available in paperback; the second, also as an e-book. Ralph Locke also contributes to American Record Guide and to the online arts-magazines New York Arts, Opera Today, and The Boston Musical Intelligencer. His articles have appeared in major scholarly journals, in Oxford Music Online (Grove Dictionary), and in the program books of major opera houses, e.g., Santa Fe (New Mexico), Wexford (Ireland), Glyndebourne, Covent Garden, and the Bavarian State Opera (Munich). He is part of the editorial team of Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal, an open-access source that includes contributions by performers (soprano Elly Ameling) as well as noted scholars (Robert M. Marshall, Peter Bloom) and is read around the world. The present review first appeared in American Record Guide and appears here with kind permission.