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    Review: ‘The Hours’ Returns to the Met Opera With Its Stars

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    Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara and Joyce DiDonato reprised their roles in Kevin Puts’s adaptation of the award-winning novel and film.Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” which had its stage premiere at the Metropolitan Opera last season and returned for its first revival on Sunday, is even prettier than I remember.In the often exquisite score, the strings throb and the woodwinds flutter. When Puts reaches for percussion instruments, he chooses the sweeter ones — glockenspiel, crotales, chimes, vibraphone — and combines them luxuriously. Woodwinds at the top of Act II are practically Wagnerian in their extravagant stateliness. Tender piano chords toll lonesomely. Musical surges are thick with nostalgia. The luscious vocal lines revel in love, and understanding, of the human voice.But it’s easy to miss the score’s manifold beauties when the stage is full of distractions. Extraneous dancers and supernumeraries flood Phelim McDermott’s production at the Met. In one moment, the choreographer Annie-B Parson has them twirl around holding pillows while a character considers killing herself in a hotel room. Adding to the busyness, Puts heavily features the chorus as a collective, omniscient narrator and the characters’ inner voices. As a device, it doesn’t work; while the story intimately intertwines the emotional lives of three women, the chorus infringes upon their connection with the audience.It’s almost as though Puts and McDermott are afraid to take a sustained look at their heroines, or that they don’t trust the audience’s attention span. This is especially perplexing considering they have three leads on the order of Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara and Joyce DiDonato, who reprised their roles on Sunday. When the stage was free of clutter, their star wattage was dazzling.As Virginia Woolf, DiDonato was a haunted, magisterial presence. Her voice, dark, fulsome and cutting, communicated Woolf’s intellectual depth and her personal demons; there was the insight and occlusion of a novelist at the height of her powers hiding her suicidal ideations from others. As Laura, O’Hara sang with a voice of fine crystal, and while her timbre was a little cloudier than it used to be, she embodied Laura’s fragile nerves and anxious self-loathing. The overall shape of Fleming’s voice remained improbably youthful in its creamy roundness. Her Clarissa was patrician yet superficial, though partial blame rests with the libretto, in which every other word of hers is “flowers” or “party.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kelli O’Hara’s Ties to Opera, From ‘The Gilded Age’ to the Met Stage

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      O’Hara is an unusual kind of triple threat: a star of Broadway and television who is appearing at the Metropolitan Opera in a revival of “The Hours.”On the HBO costume drama “The Gilded Age,” Kelli O’Hara plays a New York grande dame forced to choose sides in an opera war: remain at the old guard’s Academy of Music, or defect to the Metropolitan Opera being built by the nouveau riche they had excluded.When her character, Aurora Fane, joins a throng of socialites surveying the nearly completed Met, the camera lingers on her face, upraised in awe.O’Hara herself is far more familiar with the Met, at least in its current incarnation. In addition to being a Tony-winning star of Broadway musicals and an Emmy nominee, she has been singing at the Met for nearly a decade, and is back now for a revival of “The Hours,” starring opposite Renée Fleming and Joyce DiDonato, opera legends both.Still, the Met’s grand auditorium, which holds 4,000 people, inspires the same wonder in O’Hara as it does in Aurora. Although Aurora never had to fill it. And O’Hara does.“Once I give over to it and believe in myself, I remember that this is the way my voice wants to sing,” she said.This was on a recent morning during a break from rehearsals. O’Hara, 48, had traded her costume corset for a black jumpsuit. One hand held a paper cup of coffee. (A socialite would never.) Later she would return to the basement space where she is rehearsing “The Hours,” Kevin Puts’s adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s time-skipping novel, itself inspired by Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” which opens May 5.On “The Gilded Age,” O’Hara, left, plays Aurora Fane, a wealthy socialite who is forced to choose sides in the opera war that created the Met. She is shown with Louisa Jacobson.Barbara Nitke/HBOOne of the Met’s archivists, John Tomasicchio, stopped in to show O’Hara a few items from the Met’s founding that would have been familiar to Aurora: a piece of its original stage, an etched glass lightbulb, brocade from a box seat. Tomasicchio displayed a newspaper illustration of the audience thronging the stage.“It was like a rock concert,” O’Hara marveled. “The passion people had.”Opera was not quite O’Hara’s first passion. She went to college intending to study musical theater, but was told that her voice wasn’t built for the pop and rock styles then in vogue. As she was graduating, she participated in the Met’s National Council Auditions and made it to the finals at the regional level. But she missed the camaraderie she had experienced in musical theater, so she packed her bags and headed for Broadway.Broadway welcomed her. She starred in acclaimed productions of classic musicals including “South Pacific” and “The King and I,” for which she won a Tony. Just this week she received her eighth Tony nomination for “Days of Wine and Roses.”While she did not regret leaving opera, she sometimes wondered how she might have fared on the Met’s stage. “There was always this thing in the back of my head that said: But my voice wants to sing that way,” she said.At the very end of 2014, she had her chance, in a new production of the operetta “The Merry Widow” directed by Susan Stroman, with whom she had previously worked on Broadway. She followed that debut with a production of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in 2018. To make this leap in midcareer was frightening, but O’Hara, who runs marathons and has gone sky-diving, doesn’t mind a certain amount of fright.“I had to put my backbone straight and have conversations with myself,” she said. “’You can do this. You’re fine. Just keep your nose to the ground and do your work.’”Even as she scaled the heights of Broadway, O’Hara recalled her opera training. “There was always this thing in the back of my head that said: But my voice wants to sing that way,” she said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat work paid off. When she sang in “Così,” her “lovely soprano voice and quite good Italian diction” were praised by Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times.While opera singers occasionally make the move to Broadway (Fleming and Paolo Szot are recent examples), careers rarely flow the other way. And a performer who can do all this and television, too? That’s rarer still.“The Hours,” O’Hara’s first contemporary opera, which premiered in 2022, is a further challenge. O’Hara co-stars as Laura Brown, a woman constrained by the suburban rhythms of post-World War II California. In some ways, Laura is a companion to Kirsten, the role O’Hara was nominated for in Adam Guettel’s “Days of Wine and Roses.” Kirsten is another woman confined by the expectations of midcentury American life. Both find freedom where they can.“I’m coming off of over two years now of playing sad women, held women, even Aurora, held back, constricted,” O’Hara said.For O’Hara, opera is not exactly freeing. It’s too demanding for that, too needful of perfection. But she believes that she’ll keep pursuing it — for the difficulty, for the terror, for the range of roles. (On TV, she said, she now plays grandmothers. Opera is rather more forgiving.)O’Hara knows that she could fail. Her voice could crack. She might flub a note. But Aurora is brave enough to join the new-money mavens at the Met’s opening. And O’Hara in her way is brave, too. Brave enough to send her bright, unamplified soprano out into thousands of ears each night.“I’m confident enough to want to try,” she said. More

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      Jaap van Zweden Bids Farewell, and Other Classical Highlights

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      The Philharmonic’s maestro ends his tenure, Igor Levit comes to Carnegie Hall, and the Metropolitan Opera takes a chance on reviving two recent hits.The New York Philharmonic’s spring gala is not usually of much musical interest. It tends toward mild fare — just enough to keep the donors happy before dinner and dancing.But this year, the playing will draw closer attention. The gala, on April 24, features the only appearance this season by Gustavo Dudamel, the Philharmonic’s next music director. He will take part in the celebration of the orchestra’s education programs, including its signature Young People’s Concerts, which are turning 100.The Philharmonic has been careful not to have its Dudamel-led future step too much on its less starry present. This season also brings the final months of Jaap van Zweden’s brief tenure as music director, which will begin on his favored ground: the classics.A mid-March program of Mozart’s elegant Piano Concerto No. 17 (with Conrad Tao as soloist) and Beethoven’s deathless Fifth Symphony is such a sure audience pleaser that the Philharmonic is confidently giving it four performances, rather than the usual three.Van Zweden led the orchestra in Beethoven’s Fifth in October 2015, a few months before he got the music director job. I wrote then that “conducting this imaginative and playing this varied don’t appear at Geffen Hall every week.” His meticulousness didn’t come off as mannered, as it sometimes does. The inner two movements felt especially inventive, and I’ll be listening for whether the whole thing has the polish and momentum that have tended to elude the orchestra recently.A few days later, van Zweden will turn his attention to the new, as the Philharmonic plays fresh pieces by Tan Dun — a concerto for the principal trombonist, Joseph Alessi, called “Three Muses in Video Game” — and Joel Thompson.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Met’s ‘Dead Man Walking’ Goes to Sing Sing

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      One by one, the inmates filed into a chapel at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, N.Y. — past a line of security officers, past a sign reading, “Open wide the door to Christ.” Under stained-glass windows, they formed a circle, introducing themselves to a crowd of visitors as composers, rappers, painters and poets. Then they began to sing.The inmates had gathered one recent afternoon for a rehearsal of “Dead Man Walking,” the death-row tale that opened the Metropolitan Opera season last week. Together, they formed a 14-member chorus that would accompany a group of Met singers for a one-night-only performance of the work before an audience of about 150 of their fellow inmates.“I feel like I’m at home,” said a chorus member, Joseph Striplin, 47, who is serving a life sentence for murder, as the men warmed up with scales and stretches. “I feel I’m alive.”Steven Osgood, the conductor, with Sister Helen Prejean. Osgood rehearsed with the inmates for more than five hours, practicing rhythm, diction and dynamics.James Estrin/The New York Times“Dead Man Walking,” based on Sister Helen Prejean’s 1993 memoir about her experience trying to save the soul of a convicted murderer at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, has been staged more than 75 times around the world since its premiere in 2000.But the opera, with music by Jake Heggie and a libretto by Terrence McNally, had never been performed in a prison until last week at Sing Sing, which is home to more than 1,400 inmates.There were no costumes or props. Chorus members, who were dressed in prison-issued green pants, had to be counted and screened before entering the auditorium, lining up by cell block and building number. Arias were sometimes interrupted by the sound of security officers’ radios.Yet the opera, with its themes of sin and redemption — and of the pain endured by victims’ families — resonated with inmates.Michael Shane Hale, an inmate, with Jake Heggie, the composer of “Dead Man Walking” and DiDonato. Working on the opera, Hale said, “reminds you not to get lost in prison.”James Estrin/The New York TimesMichael Shane Hale, 51, a chorus member serving a sentence of 50 years to life for murder, said that he often thought of himself as a monster. In the 1990s, prosecutors sought the death penalty in his case. (New York suspended the practice in 2004.)Hale said the opera, which portrays the friendship between Sister Helen and Joseph De Rocher, a death-row prisoner, had taught him to see his own humanity.“We feel so powerless; we feel so invisible,” Hale said. “It reminds you not to get lost in prison.”Not everyone at Sing Sing, a maximum-security prison about 30 miles north of New York City, was enamored. Some prisoners declined to take part in the opera because of concerns about its dark themes, including the portrayal of a prisoner’s death by lethal injection. Carnegie Hall, which helped to bring the opera to Sing Sing through the education initiative Musical Connections, said that about half of the 30 inmates in the program did not participate. (Musical Connections, which has offered instruction in performance, music theory and composition to inmates since 2009, is among similar projects nationwide that aim to help prisoners connect with society through culture.)In the prison chapel, Wendy Bryn Harmer (at the keyboard) warms up the inmate participants, including Bartholomew Crawford, front. Crawford said the opera offered hope: “It shows you’re not alone in this world.”James Estrin/The New York TimesBartholomew Crawford, 54, who is serving a sentence of 25 years to life for burglary, said he understood the concerns of his fellow inmates, but that, for him, the opera offered hope.“It shows you’re not alone in this world,” he said. “It shows you that in the darkest hour there’s light somewhere.”The idea for bringing “Dead Man Walking” to Sing Sing emerged several years ago when an inmate promised the renowned singer Joyce DiDonato, who plays Sister Helen in the Met’s production, that the men could sing the chorus parts.“This is not just theater,” said DiDonato, who has been visiting Sing Sing since 2015. “This is a story that has real consequences.”An inmate in the choir at Sing Sing. Some prisoners in the Musical Connections program declined to take part in the opera because of concerns about its dark themes, including the portrayal of a prisoner’s death by lethal injectionJames Estrin/The New York TimesFor months, the men at Sing Sing worked on an abridged version of “Dead Man Walking.” Bryan Wagorn, a Met pianist, coached them via video chat and recorded individual chorus parts for them to study. (It took several weeks for the files to clear security.) He joined Manuel Bagorro, who manages Carnegie’s program, on visits to the prison.Paul Cortez, 43, who is serving a sentence of 25 years to life for murder, worked with Wagorn to learn the score and held Saturday night rehearsals with small groups of prisoners at Sing Sing. Some were initially hesitant, unsure if the opera advanced prisoners’ rights and fearing they “might be exploited,” he said, but eventually more people started showing up.“It was daunting at first,” said Cortez, who majored in theater in college. “I did not know how I was going to get the guys in shape. But they were so diligent. They took it seriously.”From left, Sister Helen; Wilson Chimborazo, an inmate who sings in the chorus; McKinny; Joseph Striplin, another inmate singing in the production; and DiDonato.James Estrin/The New York TimesLast month, DiDonato, joined by Sister Helen, 84, visited the prison to work through the music and to get to know the participants. They discussed life in prison, morality, shame and stigma, as well as Sister Helen’s efforts to abolish the death penalty. Some inmates, saying they were still consumed by guilt about their crimes, asked about seeking forgiveness.DiDonato and Sister Helen returned last week, two days after opening night at the Met, joined by singers and staff from the Met and Carnegie Hall, and by Heggie, who offered guidance on adapting the opera for a smaller stage and reviewed some of the inmates’ Musical Connections compositions.“We’ve got each other’s backs,” DiDonato said to everyone as rehearsal got underway. “This, now, is our circle.”DiDonato, who has been visiting Sing Sing since 2015, rehearsing in the chapel with inmates. “This is not just theater,” she said. “This is a story that has real consequences.”James Estrin/The New York TimesThe Met singers introduced themselves, taking pains to remind the inmates that they were only pretending to be prison guards and police officers. (“Clemency!” a prisoner shouted, after the bass Raymond Aceto announced he was playing the role of a warden.)Sister Helen, standing among the inmates, said that there was love and trust in the room.“This is a sacred gathering,” she added. “There is no place on earth at this time that I’d rather be. We’re going to create beauty today, and you’re going to feel it.”For more than five hours, the men worked with the Met artists, under the conductor Steven Osgood, practicing rhythm, diction and dynamics in three sections that feature the chorus.They stomped their feet and clapped their hands in “He Will Gather Us Around,” a spiritual that opens the opera, which is typically performed by women and children. And they sang with fiery intensity as De Rocher confesses his murder, shortly before his execution.The Met singers and Sister Helen after the performance. Susan Graham, third from left, told the inmates that she had not fully understood the meaning of the opera until that day.James Estrin/The New York TimesThe bass-baritone Ryan McKinny, who sings the role of De Rocher, offered encouragement, telling the inmates, “This is your moment to shine.” The soprano Latonia Moore, who performs as Sister Rose, complimented the speed with which they had learned a contemporary opera. “Bravo to you,” she said.And Susan Graham, the mezzo-soprano who plays De Rocher’s mother at the Met and originated the role of Sister Helen at the premiere of “Dead Man Walking” in 2000, told the inmates that she had not fully understood the meaning of the opera until that day.Then, around 6:30 p.m., an audience of inmates and corrections officials took their seats in the auditorium, adjacent to the chapel.“The most beautiful thing in the world is a human being that does something and is transformed,” Sister Helen said in introducing the opera. “Everybody’s worth more than the worst thing they ever did.”“How you lifted your voices tonight — that spirits stays here,” DiDonato told the inmates after the performance. “It is embedded in my heart.”James Estrin/The New York TimesThe prisoners watched intensely, tapping their toes on the concrete floor and gasping when an irate De Rocher tells Sister Helen: “You’re not a nun. You’re the angel of death.” One man stood up to applaud a scene near the end when De Rocher and Sister Helen tell each other, “I love you,” shortly before he is killed. After the final rendition of “He Will Gather Us Around,” the audience offered a standing ovation.Chorus members were moved too, including Hale, who said that De Rocher’s confession “blew me away.” He hoped that the opera would inspire inmates to take responsibility for their crimes.“We have to deal with the life we have left and move forward,” he said. “That’s what we’re doing here. You have murderers singing this piece at Sing Sing.”A guard watches over the production. “You have murderers singing this piece at Sing Sing,” said the inmate Michael Shane Hale.James Estrin/The New York TimesDiDonato told the chorus members that they had created something indelible.“How you lifted your voices tonight — that spirits stays here,” she said. “It is embedded in my heart.”In their few remaining minutes together in the chapel, the prisoners and artists embraced and signed programs. Security officers wandered the pews, reminding the inmates that it was time to go back to their cells.As a guard motioned toward an exit, Cortez thanked DiDonato and the other artists, telling them, “I will never forget this moment.”Then he headed for the door. “Now,” he said, “back to reality.” More

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      ‘Dead Man Walking’ Makes Its Way to the Met Opera

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      When the composer Jake Heggie wrote his first opera, “Dead Man Walking,” in the late 1990s, he never thought it would appear onstage at the Metropolitan Opera.“The Met was not doing new opera, particularly; it was not featuring or focusing them,” he said. “It just seemed a distant dream.”But next week, 23 years after its premiere at San Francisco Opera, “Dead Man Walking,” with a score by Heggie and a libretto by Terrence McNally, will finally come to the Met — opening a season in which contemporary works are front and center as the company tries to attract new audiences.Ryan McKinny, center, as Joseph De Rocher.Lila Barth for The New York TimesThe Met, which is grappling with weak ticket revenues and other financial problems, is placing a big bet on modern opera: Works by living composers, which recently have outsold the classics, make up about a third of the coming season. And although it’s still early, ticket sales for the first three weeks of the season are so far about 12 percent higher compared with the same period last year, the company said.DiDonato, center, will be singing the role of Sister Helen Prejean for the fourth time.Lila Barth for The New York TimesPeter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said he was drawn to “Dead Man Walking,” one of the few contemporary operas to have found a place in the repertory worldwide, in part because of its record of success.“Bringing it to the Met was overdue,” Gelb said. “It symbolizes the efforts that we’re making to really transform the art form and to appeal to a much broader audience base that we have to appeal to for opera to succeed and ultimately survive.”The opera — based on the 1993 memoir by Sister Helen Prejean, which was also adapted into the 1995 movie starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn — portrays Sister Helen’s struggle to save the soul of a convicted murderer.Van Hove, second from right, rehearsing his production, which features a spare set by Jan Versweyveld.Lila Barth for The New York TimesIvo van Hove’s austere staging for the Met opens with a short film depicting the attack by Joseph De Rocher and his brother on a teenage boy and girl in Louisiana. The focus shifts to Sister Helen, who has been corresponding with De Rocher, now a death-row inmate, and sets out to meet him at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.The Met has assembled a starry cast, including the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, who is singing the role of Sister Helen for the fourth time, and the bass-baritone Ryan McKinny, who performed the role of De Rocher at Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2019. The mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, who originated the role of Sister Helen in the premiere, makes a cameo as De Rocher’s mother, and the soprano Latonia Moore plays Sister Rose, while the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conducts.Van Hove’s production includes live video projected on a large screen above the stage.Lila Barth for The New York TimesDiDonato said that the opera resonated not because of its discussion of the death penalty but because it was a “love story.”“It’s an opera about looking at the dark side of who we are, or who others are, and asking, ‘And now how do we relate?’” she said. “Now how do we connect with each other? Do I dismiss you outright because of who you are or what you did or what you stand for? Or is there a way I can still open my heart and connect to you?”“It becomes,” she added, “a question of ultimately who is worthy of love and redemption.”McKinny, right, described the production as “a more emotional and psychological space” than previous ones he has performed in.Lila Barth for The New York TimesVan Hove, who made his Met debut last season with Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” said he was drawn to direct “Dead Man Walking” because it was a “very American story,” combining individual struggles with broader societal questions. In preparation for the opera, which was originally scheduled for the 2020-21 season but was delayed by the pandemic, he said he had read Sister Helen’s book but did not watch the movie.He stripped “Dead Man Walking” of many of its traditional elements, including partitions, steel bars and shackles. In his production, Sister Helen and De Rocher sometimes roam freely around the set, designed by Jan Versweyveld, with no barriers between them. Live video, a van Hove hallmark, is widely used, with onstage cameramen following around singers, whose faces are projected onto a large screen.That approach, van Hove said, is meant to highlight the story’s emotion. “A lot of the opera is situated in the minds of the people,” he added. “This mental space became, for us, like a prison.”Some of the singers initially struggled with the minimalist style, including McKinny, who had been accustomed to wearing shackles throughout the opera.“In the beginning it was like, wow, it’s hard for me to understand the isolation of death row if we don’t have death-row elements,” he said. “But actually, this stage is so open and so nothing, that it feels isolating on its own, in a more emotional and psychological space.”DiDonato said that this opera is “about looking at the dark side of who we are, or who others are, and asking, ‘And now how do we relate?’”Lila Barth for The New York TimesVan Hove has reworked other elements of the opera, including a scene in which fighting erupts as Sister Helen enters the prison. That moment is typically portrayed as a scuffle, but in this production, it unfolds as part of a basketball game, with cameramen moving among the inmates.On a recent morning, male members of the Met chorus took their places onstage and prepared to rehearse at half-speed — stretching, doing squats and jumping up and down. In performance, the scene lasts only 50 seconds but is pivotal, van Hove said.“For Helen, when she enters that prison, she enters hell,” he said. “We feel in the audience the visceral aggressiveness and the visceral violence that is in the prison there all the time.”Graham, who plays De Rocher’s mother, singing an emotional plea before the pardon board, said that the opera “really got into my DNA” after she sang the role of Sister Helen in 2000. She avoided the work in the years that followed because she found it too painful; her father died during the original run. But more recently, she has taken up the role of the mother, seeing it is a way for her to reconnect with the piece.“Dead Man Walking” is among the contemporary works that make up about a third of the Met’s season.Lila Barth for The New York Times“Getting into it from this role is almost like the other side of the coin,” she said. “Sister Helen has to keep it together and be strong for everybody. But Mama gets to wail and cry and holler. She gets to let it all hang out. In that way, it’s very cathartic.”Even though the opera, with more than 75 productions, has been performed in many of the world’s leading opera houses, Heggie said he still got emotional going to the Met for rehearsals.“I couldn’t have imagined when we wrote the piece that it would have this kind of life or power,” he said. “And so to be in the room with these literally genius creators was a real jolt. I just felt electricity in the room. I felt nervousness. I felt great power and I felt a lot of ideas vibrating.” More

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      Translating the Music of Trees Into the Sounds of Opera

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      The tech-forward composer Tod Machover has made a chamber opera of Richard Powers’s novel “The Overstory,” featuring Joyce DiDonato.Musical themes abound in the work of the novelist Richard Powers, often intertwined with science and social issues. The parallel decoding of Bach and DNA (“The Gold Bug Variations”), the saga of an interracial family of classical performers unfolding against the events of the Civil Rights era (“The Time of Our Singing”): A signature of Powers’s novels is the virtuosity with which he weaves these strands into narratives that seem both surprising and inevitable.With his 12th novel, “The Overstory,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2019, Powers draws on the findings of dendrology (the study of trees) and contemporary environmental anxieties to hint at a music that is always present but largely unrecognized — that of nature itself, as represented by the lives of trees.Powers said in an interview that his “preoccupation with the more-than-human world, the living world beyond the human” had pushed his work in a new direction for “The Overstory,” which he called “the most operatic of my novels.” It is told on a large scale, with an extended cast of characters, wide geographical scope and a long time frame.The composer Tod Machover sensed this operatic potential as soon as he read it and was especially drawn to its relevance. “The subjects Powers brings together here are so important,” Machover said in a phone interview from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, where he directs the Opera of the Future group. “I’ve always wanted to write a theatrical work with many strands that come together in an unusual way.”Machover’s first pass at the material, “Overstory Overture,” a brief chamber opera featuring Joyce DiDonato, premieres on Tuesday at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. The work, which was conceived both as a prelude to a full-scale opera and as a stand-alone piece, was commissioned by the string orchestra Sejong Soloists — their largest contemporary commission to date — and will be performed under the young conductor Earl Lee.Machover’s score.Alex Hodor-Lee for The New York TimesMachover — a composer, inventor, educator and researcher into the interface between music and technology — has developed novel approaches to electronics and is a trailblazer in the applications of artificial intelligence to music. “Overstory Overture” blends electronic and instrumental sonorities with DiDonato’s voice and acting to portray the book’s protagonist, the dendrologist Patricia Westerford. Four closely woven scenes distill not only her trajectory but also the novel’s larger themes of communication, environmental devastation and what Machover described as “the necessity of getting outside yourself and of recognizing connections we take for granted.”More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.This isn’t the first operatic adaptation of Powers’s fiction. When the Belgian composer Kris Defoort’s reworking of “The Time of Our Singing” had its premiere in Brussels in 2021, it made for “a lovely closing of the circle,” Powers said, taking his music-centered narrative and “putting it back into musical form.”But the challenges posed by “The Overstory” are different. Powers said several composers had expressed a desire to adapt it to the opera stage but he chose Machover because of a longstanding admiration for his music and a thematic affinity. He noted that works like Machover’s “Death and the Powers: The Robots’ Opera” (2010) examine issues of technology and its human ramifications that are very close to concerns in his earlier novels.“It was interesting to me that both Tod and I, who had explored human-machine interdependence, have now shifted attention to the interdependence between humans and other living things,” Powers said. A fan of DiDonato, he added that he was “completely delighted” when he learned that she would create the role of Patricia Westerford — “the heart and soul of the whole book who ties all the rest of it together.”DiDonato.Alex Hodor-Lee for The New York TimesMachover.Alex Hodor-Lee for The New York TimesRather than become involved in creating the libretto, Powers said he preferred it to be done by “people who know how to target the viscera and the minds of people inside a concert hall in real time.” Machover turned to the British writer, actor and director Simon Robson, with whom he had collaborated on his opera “Schoenberg in Hollywood” (2018).For this first part of the project, Robson compressed Powers’s delineation of Patricia throughout the sprawling novel into a sequence of scenes that evoke mythic archetypes as she comes to understand the hidden language of the forest. The soul and moral compass of the novel, she suffers with the trees the assault of “petrochemical props, chainsaw and machete” before finding peace in a new connection — which Machover sees as “what a different kind of synergy between a human being and the trees might feel like.”Powers’s novel resonated strongly with DiDonato, she said, because of her multiyear, global touring project, “EDEN,” that addresses climate change and our place in nature. She also has a longstanding connection to Machover: Her first leading role came in his 1999 opera “Resurrection,” based on a novella by Tolstoy. “That was the first time I was able to make my mark as a complete artist,” she said in an interview.Finding a vocal language for Patricia was collaborative, “totally a Tod Machover experience,” she said. “We looked for what kind of sounds we could create from me and in conjunction with the electronics and the acoustic instruments as well.”The process was playful. “But it had a deep level as well,” she added, “because both of us are passionate about this topic. Patricia is discovering these sounds that the human ear hasn’t heard before.”The orchestra — string players, a marimba and a bass drum — rehearsing. The ensemble becomes a metaphor for the forest.Alex Hodor-Lee for The New York TimesThe orchestral ensemble — 19 string players augmented by a five-octave marimba and a low bass drum — becomes a metaphor for the forest. The electronics play a multifaceted role: sonic fragments recombine to mimic chemical signaling, the process used by the trees to communicate and interact, even to warn of the harsh human threat. Patricia’s decoding of this plant language is based on the work of the scientific pioneer Suzanne Simard, who also was an inspiration for James Cameron’s “Avatar.”Yet for all the technological intervention, it’s melody, the most natural of musical elements, that is accorded critical importance here. “I tried to make the melodic line very present — one big development from beginning to end,” Machover said. Plans for a larger-scale “Overstory” opera are still being put in place, but “Overstory Overture” maps out a musical language that he expects to incorporate.“There is a music in words,” Powers said. “When I write, I try to use that music to support the semantic underpinnings of the story.” When a composer like Tod Machover adapts this to a musical form, “he is also exploring that equivalent from the other side — to take the meaning of the words and put them back into a soundscape that will embody that meaning.” More

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      Review: Renée Fleming Stars in ‘The Hours’ at the Met Opera

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      Kevin Puts and Greg Pierce’s new opera, conceived as a vehicle for the star soprano Renée Fleming, has its staged premiere at the Metropolitan Opera.“The Hours” — a new opera based on the 1998 novel and the 2002 film it inspired — features a redoubtable trio of prima donnas. And it was conceived as a vehicle for one of them, the soprano Renée Fleming, who is using it as her return to the Metropolitan Opera after five years.But on Tuesday, when the Met gave “The Hours” its staged premiere, only one of this trio of stars really shone: the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, sounding as confident and fresh, as sonorous and subtle, as she ever has in this theater.In this achingly — almost painfully — pretty, relentlessly stirring opera, with a score by Kevin Puts and a libretto by Greg Pierce, DiDonato plays Virginia Woolf, battling depression as she writes her novel “Mrs. Dalloway” in the early 1920s.The two other main characters illustrate the impact of that book through the decades. In 1949, Laura Brown (the Broadway veteran Kelli O’Hara), a pregnant Los Angeles homemaker, is reading it as she suffers Woolfian waves of despair. Fifty years after that, the sophisticated Manhattanite book editor Clarissa Vaughan (Fleming), who shares a first name with Woolf’s protagonist, is, like Clarissa Dalloway, preparing a party — this one for her onetime lover and longtime best friend, a renowned poet dying of AIDS.Michael Cunningham’s novel, Stephen Daldry’s film and the new opera all take us through one modest yet momentous day in the lives of these three women. Cunningham’s deft construction, with its precious pseudo-Woolf prose, discreetly highlights the threads of connection — flashes of the color yellow, degrees of same-sex desire — weaving the stories together.The film — which starred Meryl Streep as Clarissa, Julianne Moore as Laura, and, in a putty-nosed, Academy Award-winning turn, Nicole Kidman as Virginia — upped the portentousness, not least through Philip Glass’s soundtrack. Gravely impassioned and endlessly undulating, Glass’s score is so closely associated with this material that writing new “Hours” music is, as Puts said in a recent interview in The New York Times, something like writing a “Star Wars” opera without anything by John Williams.In Tom Pye’s scenic design, the three stories are presented on realistic islands that float around a bare stage.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThere are streaks of Minimalism in Puts’s watery rippling, as there are throughout his body of work. But though he repeats rhythmic and melodic motifs, the effect is gentler and less chugging than Glass, and — as in “Silent Night” (2012), Puts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera about a Christmas cease-fire during World War I — all else is pushed into the background by surging, strings-forward lyricism.Early in “The Hours,” Puts introduces passing hints of distinctions between the women’s worlds: for 1923, austere piano and a curdled atmosphere of syncopated winds and eerie pricks of strings; for 1949, some period light swing and echoes of the style of cheerful ad jingles. But nearly every scene in the opera eventually gets to the same place musically and dramatically, whipped into soaring emotion. The tear-jerking gets tiring.Pierce’s libretto artfully brings the women into even closer proximity than in the novel or film, enabling Puts to create, for example, gorgeous close-harmony duets for Virginia and Laura. But an awkward scene with Clarissa at the florist — Mrs. Dalloway, per Woolf’s classic opening line, is buying the flowers herself — doesn’t seem sure whether it is, or should be, comic relief. A late trio for Clarissa; her dying friend, Richard; and Louis, with whom they were enmeshed in a youthful love triangle, goes on far too long.The choral writing, which starts the opera pretty clearly representing the voices in the characters’ heads, gradually dissolves into a vaguer, more all-purpose texture — and occasionally into stentorian wails, like the villagers’ music in “Peter Grimes.” A vocalizing countertenor (John Holiday), mystifyingly called the Man Under the Arch in the cast list, hovers around, faintly suggesting the angelic.Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, gave the work its premiere in March in concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra, which he also leads, and whose strings blossom in a way that sumptuously rewarded Puts’s score.But on Tuesday — with Nézet-Séguin making his first appearance at the opera house this season, nearly two months in — the Met’s orchestra brought muscular energy to what could easily turn turgid and syrupy. (The most risible part in Philadelphia, in which a contemporary novelist named, yes, Michael arrives onstage to swear his devotion to Woolf, has thankfully been excised.)In Tom Pye’s set, the three women’s domestic spaces are realistic islands floating around a bare stage, an efficient solution to a fast-flowing drama. But Phelim McDermott’s production clutters the smooth action with choristers, actors and dancers who, in Annie-B Parson’s dull choreography, sleepwalk, slouch, wield flowers like cheerleader pom-poms, wave pots and pans, slump atop chairs and sprawl over floors.Fleming, center, among flowers held by dancers in Annie-B Parson’s choreography.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDenyce Graves, Sean Panikkar and Brandon Cedel bring dignity to the protagonists’ romantic partners; Kathleen Kim has a piquant cameo as the coloratura-wielding florist; and, best of all, Kyle Ketelsen sings the strong-willed, delusional Richard with haunting authority.O’Hara, her classical technique secure enough to have brought her success at the Met in “The Merry Widow” and “Così Fan Tutte,” is a focused actress — watch the quiet terror of her slow walk back toward her son from center stage — even if her bright, silvery soprano takes on a slight edge at full cry.But it is hard to focus on anyone else when DiDonato is onstage, often standing magnetically still. Her voice is clear in fast conversation, as she darkly relishes the words. Then, as the lines slow and expand, her tone grows smoky yet grounded, mellow yet potent. She plays Virginia as solemn and severe, but with a dry wit; if anything, she comes off as almost too robust to make paralyzing depression entirely plausible.DiDonato is a commanding enough singer and presence to render persuasive what had seemed in Philadelphia like bombastic overkill: a booming fantasy of London, a crashing evocation of incapacitating headaches. It’s only at the very top of its range that her voice tightens a bit; all in all, though, she gives a generous, noble portrayal, at its peak in her crushing delivery of lines from Woolf’s suicide note.The poignancy of the plot is amplified by Fleming, who has returned to the Met’s stage sounding pale: not frail or ugly, but at first almost inaudible and by the end underpowered, a pencil sketch of her former plushness. Having bid farewell to the standard repertory, this diva never wanted to age into opera’s supporting mother characters, and she has the influence to commission works like this, in which she can still be cast as the lead.But just as Clarissa Vaughan throbs with nostalgia for her life a few decades before, so we listen to Fleming at this point in her career and hear, deep in our ears, her supreme nights in this theater in the 1990s and early 2000s: as Mozart’s Countess, Verdi’s Desdemona, Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, Tchaikovsky’s Tatyana.And as Strauss’s Marschallin in “Der Rosenkavalier,” in which she made her last staged appearance here in 2017, and whose sublime final trio is rendingly recalled in “The Hours,” as Clarissa, Laura and Virginia at last acknowledge one another, joining in sober then swelling harmony. It’s a superb sequence, a nod to Strauss that has a sweet longing all its own.“I wanted to make something good, something true,” Richard tells Clarissa near the end of the opera. “It didn’t have to be great.”That’s a reasonable standard. And, measured against it, Puts and Pierce have succeeded.The HoursThrough Dec. 15 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      ‘The Hours’ Becomes an Opera. Don’t Expect the Book or Film.

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      “I think it needs to be more surreal,” the conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin said from the orchestra pit of the Metropolitan Opera on a recent afternoon.The scene onstage was nothing but surreal — fragmented light beams suggesting a proscenium; towering, billowing curtains lit in dreamy shades of blue, their translucence revealing the impression of a building facade beyond. Yet Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, was more interested in another element: the chorus, offstage and coloristic, an otherworldly fixture of an otherworldly environment.None of that is reminiscent of “The Hours” in its earlier iterations: Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel; or the 2002 Stephen Daldry film, which was defined as much by its tensely churning Philip Glass score as by its Oscar-bait trio of leading stars, Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep.But this is “The Hours” as adapted from both the book and the film by the writer Greg Pierce and the composer Kevin Puts. It is rendered as only opera can be: with an interplay of divas — Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara and Joyce DiDonato — who are enveloped by a restless and lush orchestra, and share a dream space with an ensemble of dancers who guide and observe them in Phelim McDermott’s staged premiere of the work, which opens at the Met on Tuesday.Renée Fleming — joined here by chorus members, the stage manager Scott Moon, kneeling, and the actress Drea Lucaciu — said she “loved, loved, loved” Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film adaptation of “The Hours.”Dina Litovsky for The New York Times“When I met Michael Cunningham,” Nézet-Séguin recalled, “he said that as a writer, words for him have to be sequential. You can’t superimpose words. But that’s where opera can melt and create parallels with the stories in real time.”AS A NOVEL, “The Hours” contains three interwoven stories, each unfolding for the most part quietly, over the course of a single day: Virginia Woolf struggles with depression while writing “Mrs. Dalloway”; Laura Brown, a homemaker in Southern California in 1949, feels oppressed by small tasks like baking a cake while just wanting to read that novel; and Clarissa Vaughan, an editor living in New York City half a century later, seems to embody “Mrs. Dalloway” as she prepares a party for her friend and former love Richard, a poet ravaged by AIDS.Fleming “loved, loved, loved” the Daldry film, she said in an interview over the summer. Some had thought she had made her farewell to staged opera in 2017, as the Marschallin in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” one of her signature roles. But she was quickly looking for a new project at the Met, and her right-hand man, Paul Batsel, suggested an adaptation of the story by Puts. Fleming was into the idea; so was Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager.The work would require three singers on the level of the film’s stars. Fleming took on Streep’s role, as Clarissa; then came DiDonato as Virginia Woolf (played by Kidman in the movie); and, Kelli O’Hara as Laura (Moore). O’Hara has made a career as a decorated Broadway star but is such an opera natural that she was the highlight of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in 2018.O’Hara has made a career as a decorated Broadway star.Dina Litovsky for The New York Times“I remember reading the book so hungrily,” she said. “The commentary on this time period, the survival, mental health, which I think is so appropriate right now. It just spoke to me so deeply.”In writing the opera, Pierce and Puts exploited what previous forms of the story couldn’t. “Some films have tried simultaneity,” Puts said. “But because of the nature of harmony and rhythmic notation, you can have things overlap here, and that’s very exciting. What you have to decide on is one sort of primary backdrop, musically, that unifies them. And that became interesting for me.”Puts’s score — which is written through, eclectic and soaringly lyrical — contains dreamy touches befitting the fluid nature of Pierce’s text, which has nearly 30 scenes that dissolve in and out of one another. A countertenor role, sung at the Met by John Holiday, in which the singer appears in different guises, can be seen as something like an angel of death or ferryman. A children’s chorus that Richard, the dying poet, hears in his head turns out to be the nieces and nephews of Virginia Woolf, holding a funeral for a bird. Other recursive phrases include music associated with Virginia that Clarissa overhears from a church choir.“What’s the meaning of that?” Puts said. “I’m not even sure what the answer is, but I think that’s what can be interesting.”From left, William Burden, Fleming and Kyle Ketelsen in rehearsal.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesHaunting the music is Glass’s Minimalist soundtrack for the “Hours” film. Puts called it “a beautiful score,” and recognized the danger in putting up his own work against it. “It’s almost like, would you write a ‘Star Wars’ opera?” he said, referring to John Williams’s famous music for that franchise. “No, I wouldn’t. It would be the dumbest thing in the world because it’s so iconic.”But, Puts added, while there are suggestions of a Minimalist style in the “Hours” opera — not for the first time in his compositional career — the work organically developed into something else. “The opera is so different that it’s its own thing,” he said. Nézet-Séguin described the score as having “just enough Minimalism,” but bringing “it to another, more lyrical, approach.”With the cast in place early, Puts tailored the score to Fleming, DiDonato and O’Hara. “I imagine if you’re writing a screenplay and you know Robert De Niro is going to play this character,” he said, “then every line you write, you imagine him delivering it.” And, he added, he is happy to reflect the specificity of their sounds and revise accordingly during rehearsals rather than plan for later productions and casts: “In a case like this, I’m not as concerned about the future.”All three stars have responded positively to the way their roles sit in their voices. This summer, DiDonato said that while reading through the score, she would tell herself, “Oh, Kevin, that’s the money note.” And Fleming, who has worked with Puts before — “He knows my voice really well” — said that his writing was singer friendly, with phrases separated, “so you’re not really stuck in a high register or a challenging tessitura consistently.”Kelli O’Hara, who sings the role of Laura, said: “I remember reading the book so hungrily, The commentary on this time period, the survival, mental health, which I think is so appropriate right now.”Dina LitovskyPuts developed a sound world for each woman. Clarissa’s, he said, is quintessentially American. Virginia’s draws on piano and an ornamental language befitting an earlier time in the English countryside, but with a winding harmony that, he hopes, evokes Woolf’s writing. Laura’s music, however, is more like that of her husband — of darkly cheery post-World War II domesticity that becomes something of a prison for her to escape from. All three come together in the finale, in a succession and layering of style.Nézet-Séguin conducted the world premiere with the Philadelphia Orchestra in March, and felt, hearing it for the first time, that “Kevin got so much right.” A few things have changed between then and now: the tessitura of the chorus, for instance, and some cuts along with additions. Crucially, the Met’s presentation is different simply for being staged.McDERMOTT, whose Met credits include blockbuster productions of Glass’s “Satyagraha” and “Akhnaten,” had been told that the opera’s constant shifting of time and place would make it “impossible” to direct. Yet he took it on, joined by the choreographer Annie-B Parson, the mind behind the infectiously exuberant movement in David Byrne’s “American Utopia.”“It’s like directing three operas on top of each other,” McDermott said. “There are so many scenes, and it’s filmic, so you need to get from place to place in a way that’s enjoyable rather than holding weight.”All three stars have responded positively to the way their roles sit in their voices. This summer, DiDonato, right, said that while reading through the score, she would tell herself, “Oh, Kevin, that’s the money note.” Dina LitovskyMcDermott and Parson have long been at work on “The Hours,” including a workshop over the summer, months before the singers arrived for rehearsals. “I was given time with the dancers first,” Parson said, “which was very luxurious.” She didn’t end up using everything but experimented with having them “defy the weight of the architecture” in magical ways that included blowing sets with their breath to move them, or occupying the set like cats — observational and impossible to read.Parson said she has been guided in part by Woolf herself. “Experimentation was the heart of work,” she said. “That was always on my mind — gender fluidity, feminism — and I wanted to start with her.”The dancers, McDermott said, “set the atmosphere of the scenes.” They are involved with maintaining the action’s momentum, but they also move with a vocabulary that is sometimes in harmony with scenes across time, like spirits. The choreography, Parson said, is “an embroidery of these worlds.”A week before opening night, the opera’s many moving parts were still finding their places. There was talk of many tears during rehearsals, but there has also been laughter. An emotional high point — Richard’s suicide by falling out a window — was a clunky comedy of errors that had DiDonato, who was watching from a seat in the auditorium, joking, “Guffman called.”McDermott referred to this as the moment that comes in any rehearsal process when it’s difficult to avoid thinking, “Oh my God, we’ve taken on too much.”Then, he added, something tends to happen. “You want all the performers and musicians to be resonating with each other in a perfect, beautiful way,” he said. “Then the piece begins to speak to itself. But what I’ve noticed is, it doesn’t really turn up until the audiences comes. That’s when you’ll see how strong the atmosphere can be.” More

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      Three Divas Give Voice to ‘The Hours’ at the Met Opera

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      New York City’s opera event of the fall — an adaptation of “The Hours” having its staged premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in November — started with a pitch from Renée Fleming.Fleming, the superstar soprano, was mulling over new projects when Paul Batsel, her right-hand man, suggested “The Hours,” Michael Cunningham’s novel inspired by Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” which weaves together one day in the lives of three women across time: Woolf, writing her book; a midcentury homemaker named Laura Brown, who is reading it; and a 1990s editor named Clarissa Vaughan, who, like Clarissa Dalloway, is organizing a party, here for a friend diminished by AIDS.“The Hours” won Cunningham a Pulitzer Prize in 1999, and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 2002, starring a power trio of Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman. Crucially, that movie was scored by Philip Glass, whose soundtrack unified the three stories as lucidly as the motif of “Mrs. Dalloway” did.“I loved, loved, loved the film when it came out,” Fleming, who is singing the role of Clarissa, said in an interview. “It haunted me and stayed with me. The performances were so brilliant, and when I went back to it — all of these ideas, suicide, their lives as L.G.B.T.Q. people in New York City at that time, the period, all that was powerful for me. So when Paul suggested it, I thought: That’s perfect. Three divas, what could be better?”Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, agreed. A composer was already in hand — Kevin Puts, who won the Pulitzer Prize for “Silent Night” in 2012, working here with the librettist Greg Pierce — but the company needed two more stars. Enter Kelli O’Hara, a Tony Award-decorated musical theater actress with opera bona fides (even at the Met, where she was a standout as Despina in Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte”), in the role of Laura; and, as Virginia Woolf, the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, a house regular and audience favorite.The Philadelphia Orchestra premiered “The Hours” in concert form earlier this year, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Reviewing that performance, Zachary Woolfe wrote in The New York Times that, “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.”Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, will be in the pit when the opera arrives at the Met in November, directed by Phelim McDermott (most recently of “Akhnaten” fame) and choreographed by Annie-B Parson. Spread around the world but speaking together on a shared video call, the production’s three stars discussed how they are preparing for rehearsals and for bringing their characters to the opera stage. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.“It really is evocative,” O’Hara said of Kevin Puts’s score. “The more I listen to it, the more I have it circling in me; it’s one of those things that you become obsessed with.”Thea Traff for The New York TimesThese three roles were written with your voices in mind. Can you explain how that plays out in practice?KELLI O’HARA Can I just give a shout-out to Kevin Puts? To have a composer who’s living now and writing now and writing so beautifully now — Renée’s choice of him was so special. He came to a couple of sing-through sessions just to hear me and write a little bit more specifically. I do not take that for granted. To listen and make changes appropriately, he’s quite a mensch that way.RENÉE FLEMING He’s written a lot for me, and he knows my voice really well. The thing that works for me is that the phrases have separation between them, so you’re not really stuck in a high register or a challenging tessitura consistently. And that’s what makes it possible. I’m loving [singing] it in my living room, so let’s hope that translates to the big house.JOYCE DiDONATO I’m looking at the page, I’m looking at the score, and I’m like: Oh Kevin, that’s the money note that audiences will be waiting for. One of the cool things, as I’m working on it, is that I’m finding the groove very easily. It is being crafted for us, but the sign of a really good composer is that it’s clear this can have a life beyond this production. He’s writing it in such a lyrical way that a lot of different voices will be able to take this on. That’s what we want; we want these projects to have a legacy.What do you think makes this version of “The Hours” effective opera?FLEMING Libretti are hard because you have to reduce the number of words to a minimum in order to have room for the music, and that’s especially true here. Greg Pierce’s libretto is concise, and it’s colorful and just beautifully wrought.O’HARA It feels like there’s a constant movement of the drama. That makes it feel, in a way, cinematic. Some of the score as well. It really is evocative. The more I listen to it, the more I have it circling in me; it’s one of those things that you become obsessed with.FLEMING Kevin is not afraid to write something that’s moving and beautiful for the general public. And that is something that, in my lifetime, composers in opera have struggled with.DiDONATO This is an emotional story. Some of the recent pieces that I have seen are very graphic and angular and have sanitized, in a way, the emotion. And I don’t find it in any way maudlin and saccharine — which used to be good words in opera, but I understand why we hesitate to indulge in that. But that, in some ways, is what opera does best.One of the things I look for, certainly with a new piece, is: Why does this need to be sung? What I think they have done really brilliantly is the overlay, the way you can have the same emotional experience by different people in different contexts. And that’s something that can happen easily in opera and not so much in the cinema or theater world. There’s a scene where Virginia Woolf is trying to write, and she’s struggling with just getting the day started, and then Laura comes in and she’s reading it. We have the same words, one is being created and one is being received, and they both are being felt in very different ways. That adds a huge layer of complexity that really works on the opera stage.“We’re always competing against ghosts of the past who created roles,” said DiDonato, who plays Virginia Woolf. Ana Cuba for The New York TimesHow are you coming at these characters, which have been famously occupied by Hollywood stars? Kelli, in your case, this is the second time you are taking on one of Julianne Moore’s roles, after the musical adaptation of “Far From Heaven.”O’HARA I didn’t go back to the movie; that’s sort of a rule for me. If I’ve seen it, I won’t watch it again. Because the only way to make it human or different or new is to put your own vision through it and metabolize it in your own body, your heart and bring it forth. I think that’s what the three of us will do. Opera is very different from film. I haven’t even really considered it being up for comparison.DiDONATO We’re always competing against ghosts of the past who created roles. To me, the key is always, I do the research, but my job is to put the score in front of me and not create past versions. I learned that quite a long time ago. Go to the source, go to the score, the text, and you have to leave the rest behind.FLEMING Well, I’ve always wanted to play Meryl Streep [laughs]. But also, for me, this is one of the only times I’ve gotten to perform a period from my own lifetime. I still have clothing from the ’90s.O’HARA That’s wild. I’m going back to the ’50s. Just put me there all the time.DiDONATO You do get the cutest clothes from that period. I have a little bit of wardrobe envy.You have praised how “The Hours” — whether the book, the film or this opera — captures women’s feelings and experiences. All were created by men. What do they get right?FLEMING This is tricky, because obviously I was pressing for women in the creative team, so we have a choreographer. I think it’s important, moving forward, to appropriately give representation to the stories being told. Even the fact that Denyce Graves [in the role of Sally] and I are lovers in this. This may be something that people clock — that [the queer] community is not represented, at least in the principals. It’s very challenging, on so many different fronts.That said, I do think they did a very good job, and Michael Cunningham did a great job. I have a long relationship with Strauss and Hofmannsthal; there are historical pairings of librettist and composer that have really shockingly presented a woman’s inner life extremely well.“Kevin is not afraid to write something that’s moving and beautiful for the general public,” Fleming said. “And that is something that, in my lifetime, composers in opera have struggled with.”Thea Traff for The New York TimesO’HARA From the Laura Brown perspective, Michael Cunningham is writing his own mother. Look at Sondheim; there is this precedent of artists who work things out in their art. So I want to join them and bring out their story, and my own story with my mother, and my own experience of being a mother. You do have someone who’s writing from a very real place. I’ll come in, and I have to make this woman human and empathetic in the same way. But they are writing from deep knowledge and pain.FLEMING AIDS is at the center of Michael Cunningham’s book as well. A friend of mind said, “I’m glad the Met is finally producing a gay story,” and I thought: Huh, I thought this was about three women. There are different perspectives in this piece. It’s wonderful in that way.DiDONATO For me, I think they’ve captured the captivity sensation that Virginia felt, or that I imagine she felt at that time — the limitations put on her, what it was to be a creative genius as a woman. We do need representation at the table, as Renée is saying. But one of the magical things about the theater is that it’s always about getting in someone else’s head. And that can be me, a girl from Kansas City, trying to understand Virginia Woolf. It can be a man trying to understand a woman, a son about his mother. It’s dangerous if we start blocking those creative outlets.What’s exciting is that we are demanding that those doors are open to everybody. But I don’t think that means we should shut doors completely. We’d be missing out on a lot of great art. I think it’s thrilling that these men want to tell this story. Let’s have a woman write it as well. We have lots of “Barber of Sevilles” and “Figaros.” Let a woman write “The Hours,” and we can compare. More