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      Met Opera, Reeling From Cyberattack, Will Sell Tickets on New Site

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      The company’s computer systems have been down for more than three days. It will now use a Lincoln Center website to offer $50 general admission seats to some performances.Three days after a cyberattack first paralyzed its website and box office, the Metropolitan Opera on Friday announced that it would sell $50 tickets to some performances on a site run by Lincoln Center.The Met, in a brief note posted on social media, said it would offer the general admission tickets as it worked to fully restore its computer systems, which have been down since Tuesday morning. The company has proceeded with all of its performances, including of “Aida” and “The Hours,” but the Met has been unable to sell any new tickets, including in its last-minute rush ticket program.“We appreciate your patience through this difficult time as we work to resolve the issue and resume full operations,” the note said.The attack has wreaked havoc as the Met prepares for a string of holiday productions. At this time of year, the company’s ticketing systems typically handle about $200,000 in sales each day.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said it could be several more days before the Met’s ticketing site is fully restored. The attack has also sidelined the company’s internal networks, including its payroll system.“It takes time, because when you have been hacked, you have to be sure that whatever functions are going back online are not going to be compromised,” he said.Gelb said the Met was still investigating who had carried out the attack and assessing the damage.Separately, the Musikverein, a concert hall in Vienna, posted a message this week saying its website was unavailable. “We apologize for the inconvenience and hope to be able to provide our usual service as soon as possible,” the Musikverein said.The cyberattack comes at a difficult time for the Met, which is still working to recover from the turmoil of the coronavirus pandemic and lure back audiences. Attendance is well below prepandemic levels.“At a time when you’re trying to get more people interested in opera and attending your performances, it’s incredibly frustrating,” Gelb said. “We all want the same thing, which is to make it easier for people to attend performances, not more difficult.”The Met will offer $50 tickets for three upcoming performances of Verdi operas: “Rigoletto” on Sunday and Wednesday, and “Aida” on Tuesday. Since the Met cannot connect to its ticketing system to see which seats have already been sold, the $50 seats will be general admission. Customers who buy the tickets will be given empty seats in the orchestra section on a first-come, first-served basis immediately before curtain.Tickets are being sold on www.lincolncenter.org/metopera. More

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      Joyce Bryant, Sensual Singer Who Changed Course, Dies at 95

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      In the 1940s and ’50s she was a glamorous Black star when there were few. Then she became a missionary.Joyce Bryant, a sultry singer of the 1940s and ’50s who broke racial barriers in nightclubs and raised the hackles of radio censors before setting aside her show business career in favor of missionary work, then reinventing herself as a classical and opera singer, died on Nov. 20 in Los Angeles, at the home of her niece and longtime caregiver, Robyn LaBeaud. She was 95.Ms. LaBeaud said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.Ms. Bryant was a teenager when she first attracted attention on the West Coast with her striking voice and equally striking looks. She started out with the Lorenzo Flennoy Trio — “Can’t just can’t get rid of those chills up and down my spine whenever Joyce Bryant with the Flennoy Trio sings ‘So Long,’” J.T. Gipson wrote in The California Eagle in 1946.Soon she was appearing regularly at clubs, first in San Francisco and Los Angeles and then beyond. And she was developing a signature sexiness, wearing striking gowns that accented her hourglass figure.“Many of Joyce’s gowns are created so form-fitting that the singer cannot sit down in them,” The Pittsburgh Courier wrote in 1954. “Joyce has had to develop a glide to move about.”And there was her hair — silver, thanks to the application of radiator paint. Sometimes she went with an all-silver look: hair, gown, nails. It was a gimmick, she told The Montreal Star in 1967, that had been born of a desire to set herself apart from Lena Horne and Josephine Baker, two top Black stars of the day, at a benefit concert.“After them, who was going to listen to me?” she said. “I knew I had to do something different.”The “something different” garnered a long standing ovation, she told The Star. and “I don’t think the audience even heard me sing that night.”In her nightclub appearances, Ms. Bryant developed a signature sexiness, wearing striking gowns that accented her hourglass figure.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesHer look was only one factor in her fame. The other was her delivery, which on certain songs was boldly sensual. Her first record, released on the London label in 1949, was a song called “Drunk With Love” that she imbued with so much sexiness that some radio stations wouldn’t play it. (One in Los Angeles would play it only at night, news accounts at the time said.)A second release, her version of the Cole Porter song “Love for Sale,” encountered similar resistance.“Joyce Bryant’s waffles, ‘Drunk With Love’ and ‘Love for Sale,’ are darn good, but you’ll have to take our word,” Walter Winchell, the influential columnist and a Bryant fan, told his readers in June 1953. “Both ditties are banned from networks.”Her nightclub performances sizzled as well. When singing one number, she would pick out a patron, sit on his lap and give him a bite on the neck or ear or cheek.“Not a hard bite,” she said in a 2001 video interview with Jim Byers, who is making a documentary about her, “but a little nip.”In 1952 she was booked into the new Algiers Hotel in Miami Beach, one of the first Black performers to headline in that town. She was advised to tone down her act for the largely white audience, she said, but didn’t.Her first show shocked the crowd. For her second, she said, she noted a different seating pattern — the men in the audience somehow were all front and center.“There were all the rednecks and everybody sitting on the aisles,” she said, “hoping to be the one that was going to be bitten.”But she hadn’t escaped the racism of the day. When she was booked into the Algiers, she said, “It brought about a lot of stuff; it brought about burning crosses and threats.”Mr. Byers, who has studied Ms. Bryant’s life for decades, said that she engendered strong reactions because she was a dark-skinned Black woman (in contrast to lighter-complexioned Black stars of the day like Dorothy Dandridge) who was openly sensual. Her banned records, he said, had suggestive lyrics but not dirty ones.“Really,” he said, “the crux of it was that she was an African American woman singing these sensual love songs.”But in 1955, with her career going well, Mr. Bryant quit show business for a time. She told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1965 that after her voice gave out during an engagement at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, she overheard a conversation between a doctor and her manager. The doctor advised vocal rest; the manager instead urged him to give her cocaine to get through her shows.“I said to myself, if a human being can be exploited this way,” she said, “if somebody who is supposed to be guiding your career can be so selfish and greedy, even willing to risk you becoming hooked on narcotics for the sake of the almighty dollar, then I’d better get out.”She had been raised a Seventh-day Adventist and grew increasingly ambivalent about her singing career and her sexy onstage persona the more famous she became.“I felt for three years that I was living a lie,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1956.Ms. Bryant in 1977. She took a break from her singing career in the 1950s, doing missionary work and then becoming a teacher.Chester Higgins/The New York TimesShe entered Oakwood College (now Oakwood University) in Huntsville, Ala., a historically Black institution run by the church. She did missionary work and then became a teacher in Washington. There she was encouraged to try opera, and in 1965 she was back on a New York stage, singing the role of Bess in a New York City Opera staging of “Porgy and Bess.”Harold C. Schonberg wrote in The New York Times that her voice was not quite strong enough for the part, but that he was mesmerized by her acting, calling her “beautiful, lithe, intense.”“When she made her entrance,” he wrote, “wives in the audience clutched their husbands’ arms. A black panther was on the loose.”She played Bess in various houses across the country for several years. Then, in the 1970s, she reinvented herself again, performing a more modest pop-and-standards cabaret act in places like Cleo’s and the Rainbow Grill in Manhattan.“Song by song,” John S. Wilson of The Times wrote in reviewing her at the Cotton Club in New York in 1978, “Miss Bryant’s performance is a masterful display of concept, structure, and a delivery that bristles with vitality.”Mr. Byers said that in the early 1990s Ms. Bryant, who was living in New York at the time, was walking near Lincoln Center on a sidewalk that was being repaired. She took a fall and was injured, breaking a knee and chipping some teeth.“That’s when she basically disappeared,” he said, moving back to California and fading into relative obscurity.Ms. Bryant performing at the Rainbow Grill in Manhattan in 1977.Chester Higgins/The New York TimesEmily Ione Bryant was born on Oct. 14, 1927, in Oakland, Calif. Her father, Whitfield, was a chef for the Southern Pacific Railroad, and her mother, Dorothy (Withers) Bryant, was a homemaker.Ms. LaBeaud, her niece, said that Ms. Bryant’s grandmother used to remark that her granddaughter’s singing around the house brought joy; “joy” became “Joyce,” which Ms. Bryant began calling herself.Ms. Bryant’s career got started when she and some friends were visiting Los Angeles and went to a nightclub where the entertainer was leading an audience singalong.“All of a sudden she realizes that no one else is singing but her,” Mr. Byers said. Her arresting voice got her paired with the Flennoy Trio and, Mr. Byers said, also got her a film role as a nightclub singer in the 1946 George Raft movie “Mr. Ace.” But, Mr. Byers said, she was shown only in fleeting glimpses, and subsequent scenes in other movies were cut entirely, which he attributed to Hollywood’s racial constraints at the time.She appeared regularly at nightspots like the Club Alabam in Los Angeles, then received a career boost when Pearl Bailey, appearing at the West Hollywood club Ciro’s, became ill and she was brought in to complete the engagement. That got her a booking at Bill Miller’s Riviera in Fort Lee, N.J., just outside New York, in the summer of 1951, where Mr. Winchell saw her and became a fan.“Almost every day I got a mention in his column,” she told The New York Times in 1977. “That did it for me.”Ms. Bryant is survived by a brother, Randolph.Mr. Byers said that Ms. Bryant remained relatively unknown because she did not fit show business molds — first as a glamorous Black nightclub singer when that was not common, then as someone who turned her back on fame.“What has always fascinated me about Joyce’s career,” he said, “is what it says about the machinery of popular culture.” More

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      Kornel Mundruczo Brings Powerful Imagery to Wagner and Film

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      Kornel Mundruczo’s varied career has included the Oscar-nominated movie “Pieces of a Woman,” stage productions across Europe and now, “Lohengrin.”MUNICH — On a recent morning, the atmosphere on the rehearsal stage of the Bayerische Staatsoper, the main opera house here, was charged with anticipation.The director Kornel Mundruczo was supervising Act I of “Lohengrin,” Richard Wagner’s romantic opera about a mysterious knight sent by the Holy Grail to save a damsel in distress, and as they waited for the title character to appear, the vocal soloists and extras milled about in street clothes among rocks and grass scattered on the stage.Mundruczo made adjustments to the performers’ positions and gestures, ensuring that they conveyed nervous excitement. When Lohengrin, played by Klaus Florian Vogt, casually appeared midway through the act, Mundruczo surveyed the scene.“That’s super good,” he said with satisfaction.When the opera opens here on Saturday, it will close an uncommonly busy — and varied — year for the prolific Hungarian director.Over the past 12 months, Mundruczo, 47, has overseen a world premiere opera in Berlin and Geneva; a new play in Berlin; Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” in Hamburg, Germany; and has directed four of 10 episodes in the first season of the Apple TV+ series “The Crowded Room.”Serge Dorny, the Bayerische Staatsoper’s general manager, said he saw “Lohengrin” as “an extremely contemporary story,” adding that Mundruczo’s interest in topical themes, and how he has handled them over a range of artistic genres, was in part what led him to enlist the director for “Lohengrin.”Mundruczo’s production of “Lohengrin” at Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich. Over the past two decades, he has produced a multifaceted body of work across numerous countries, languages and genres.W. HoeslEqually important, however, was Mundruczo’s ability to create “powerful images that stay in our memories,” Dorny said.Mundruczo’s style is direct and emotional, but it is often tinged with fantastical elements that veer into magical realism: In one particularly vivid example, a recent Mundruczo production was set almost entirely inside a gigantic salmon.While Vogt said that Mundruczo’s background in film was clear from his ability to create “intense images” in “Lohengrin,” the singer called Mundruczo a “deeply musical person,” who had enormous respect for the score.This artistic versatility makes Mundruczo a rarity among today’s directors. Over the past two decades, he has produced a multifaceted body of work across numerous countries, languages and genres.In the English-speaking world, Mundruczo is best known for his 2020 film “Pieces of a Woman,” which garnered acclaim for the director, its writer, Kata Weber, and its lead actress, Vanessa Kirby, who earned an Oscar nomination for her turn as a mother processing the death of her newborn. Martin Scorsese signed on as an executive producer after seeing an early cut of the film.“With Kornel, you feel and see a real drive to express something in images and sounds,” Scorsese wrote in an emailed statement. “It’s real cinematic storytelling. No matter what Kornel makes, I’m interested.”Vanessa Kirby earned an Oscar nomination for her performance in Mundruczo’s “Pieces of a Woman.”Benjamin Loeb/NetflixMundruczo’s production of the opera “Sleepless” was dominated by a giant salmon.Nina Hansch/picture alliance, via Getty ImagesBorn in 1975 in Godollo, a small city outside Budapest, Mundruczo dreamed of becoming a painter as a teenager, but when he first picked up a camera at 21, he knew filmmaking was what he was meant to do.“I wasn’t planning for it to happen, but for me there was no longer any question,” Mundruczo said in an earlier interview in Berlin. “That hasn’t changed.”The director characterized his early shorts and first three features as “bohemian friendship movies, like early Almodóvar,” he created with “whoever was around,” he said, referring to the Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar. Mundruczo made his first feature film in 2000 while still a student. Of the eight that have come since, six have premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, including “White God” (2014), which features a canine takeover of Budapest, and “Jupiter’s Moon” (2017), in which a Syrian refugee learns to fly.While building up his film career, Mundruczo also started directing plays for an independent theater group. In 2009, he co-founded Proton Theater in Budapest, where he serves as artistic director. Before long, his stage productions were getting attention on the international theater festival circuit.Mundruczo suggested that his outsider status as a filmmaker had helped him bring a new perspective to his stage productions, which tour throughout Europe. “I’m not a theater person,” he said, “and the theater festival system always needs new voices.”The director also welcomes a certain degree of cross-pollination between his stage and screen work. Before it was a film, “Pieces of a Woman” was a play written by Weber and first performed in 2018 at the TR Warszawa theater in Warsaw. “Evolution,” another collaboration between Weber and Mundruczo (who are both romantic and artistic partners), started life as part of a staged performance before they developed it into a film.When it comes to switching between genres, “I enjoy that it’s other parts of your soul working,” Mundruczo said. Gordon Welters for The New York Times“Evolution,” which premiered at the 2019 Ruhrtriennale festival in Bochum, Germany, was one of a string of productions in that country that inspired Mundruczo and Weber to move to Berlin from Budapest with their daughter several years ago. They were also guided by concerns about the political situation in Hungary, which continues its rightward slide under Prime Minister Viktor Orban.“I’m sure every New Yorker felt the same during the Trump era,” he said. “It can be tough. You feel a certain pressure.”Although he has never faced direct censorship in Hungary, the Hungarian National Film Board rejected funding for “Pieces of a Woman,” Mundruczo said. “They sent a beautiful letter — I still have it — they wrote that there is no audience for this movie,” he said.When it became a play in Warsaw, its Jewish themes, which were inspired by Weber’s family history, fell by the wayside. “Not that many Jewish people live in Poland, and we all know why,” Mundruczo said. Weber was able to restore some of the Jewish content in the film version, which moved the action to Boston, a city with a large Jewish population.Several of those themes, including a miraculous tale of survival at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust, are elaborated in the film “Evolution,” a multigenerational tale that begins in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and ends in modern-day Berlin.Since “Evolution” premiered at Cannes in summer 2021, Mundruczo has taken a hiatus from the silver screen. This year he made his debut at Berlin’s Staatsoper, directing the world premiere of Peter Eotvos’s “Sleepless,” the production dominated by a giant salmon.Matthias Schulz, the general manager of the Berlin State Opera, said that “first of all,” Mundruczo was a filmmaker. “He’s very precise and gives a lot of hints, just like he has to do when making a movie,” he said, describing “Sleepless” as having the atmosphere of “an opera and a movie at the same time.”Both the Berlin State Opera and Munich’s Bayerische Staatsoper have invited Mundruczo back to direct in future seasons. In addition to making “The Crowded Room” for the small screen, Mundruczo hopes to return to filmmaking soon, although he said that it was too early to share project details.When it comes to switching between opera, dramatic theater, television and film, “I enjoy that it’s other parts of your soul working,” Mundruczo said. “It’s very healthy when you’re not a one genre maniac,” he added.Perhaps someday he’ll be able to devote himself exclusively to one art form. “But I’m not there yet,” he said with a laugh. More

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      A Not-Quite-Star Maestro Has a Starry Season at the Met

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      Carlo Rizzi, a Met Opera regular sometimes taken for granted, opened the company’s season this fall and has juggled “Medea,” “Tosca” and “Don Carlo.”Deep in Verdi’s opera “Don Carlo,” an impassioned solo cello line embroiders a bass aria with a vein of feeling.On a recent evening, the conductor Carlo Rizzi was leading the work at the Metropolitan Opera. Rizzi isn’t demonstrative on the podium; his gestures tend to be controlled, focused, professional. But from a seat at the back of the pit, it was possible to see him, at the end of the aria, smile slightly and blow a subtle kiss down in the direction of the orchestra’s principal cello, Rafael Figueroa.It was an affectionate, familial gesture from a man who has become family at the Met. “Don Carlo,” which runs through Saturday, is part of a three-production fall for Rizzi — along with Cherubini’s “Medea,” the season opener, and Puccini’s “Tosca” — that brings his number of performances with the company to more than 250 since his debut in 1993.“I am not 20 anymore,” Rizzi, 62, said in an interview the morning after a “Don Carlo” and before a “Tosca” that evening. “Particularly after the pandemic, I want to enjoy what I’m doing. That’s why I’m happy about these three works at the Met. Each one, in a different way, has been rewarding.”Rizzi is among the stars of the Met’s not-quite-stars, in company with conductors like Nello Santi (who led some 400 Met performances between 1962 and 2000) and Marco Armiliato (nearly 500 since 1998). These are not famous names, just musicians experienced and respected enough to allow the company’s vast repertory factory to function, particularly when it comes to core Italian works like “La Bohème,” “Rigoletto” and “La Traviata” that must be put on with perilously little rehearsal time.His name and face familiar to Met regulars — from the side, with his toss of silver hair and chin stubble, he looks a little like Plácido Domingo — Rizzi is the kind of artist who can be entrusted with “Medea,” a rarely performed opera that he had never done or even seen, late in the game, in addition to his long-scheduled “Tosca” and “Don Carlo.”“He did three operas at once,” said the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, who sang the title role in “Medea.” “Who else can do that? And not just get through them: These were three spectacularly conducted operas. In my opinion, he is one of the best Italian conductors living right now.”Sondra Radvanovsky sang the title role in “Medea,” which Rizzi conducted to open the Met’s season.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I find him academic, in a good way,” said Michael Fabiano, here singing Cavaradossi in “Tosca” under Rizzi, with Aleksandra Kurzak. “He’s very studied and highly informed.” Karen Almond/Met OperaYet many descriptions of Rizzi include variations on the apologetic phrase “but in a good way.” “It’s going to sound pejorative,” the tenor Michael Fabiano, who starred in “Tosca,” said, “but I find him academic, in a good way. He’s very studied and highly informed.”Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, added, “He’s considered to be really strong, really solid, really reliable — solid in a good way.”The takeaway is that the soft-spoken Rizzi embodies qualities of patient, unshowy craft and dependability that are often overlooked, sadly old-fashioned and definitely unsexy. But they should not be taken for granted.“It’s underestimated how difficult it is for a conductor to succeed at the Met,” Gelb said. “There aren’t so many who have the degree of expertise and level of musicality when it comes to Italian repertoire that he has. We’re fortunate to have a conductor of his quality willing to come here to do the standard repertory.”Born in 1960 in Milan, Rizzi didn’t grow up in a musical family; his father was a chemist and his mother an accountant. But he was shy as a young child, and his parents tried to draw him out with piano lessons; he flourished. (His two siblings ended up with musical careers, too.)On top of his studies, Rizzi spent many nights watching opera at the Teatro alla Scala. These were Claudio Abbado’s years as music director there, and the productions and casts were regularly superb.“I was a pianist, and at the time I was very good at sight-reading,” Rizzi said. “That means that every clarinetist, bassoonist, singer and double bass player was coming to me. And making music together started to become more interesting than just the piano.”He conducted chamber orchestras, and Mozart concertos from the keyboard, and in his late teens began working as a repetiteur — the opera rehearsal assistant position that was the main root of old-school conducting careers.Rizzi did well in a couple of competitions, and began to find work in regional capitals like Palermo and Trieste. Word spread among singers. He was invited to conduct the Donizetti rarity “Torquato Tasso” at the Buxton Festival in England in 1988; that led to an engagement at the Royal Opera in London, and a broadcast reached Brian McMaster, then the leader of Welsh National Opera, who hired Rizzi as music director in Cardiff.Matthew Epstein took over for McMaster just as Rizzi was starting his tenure. (Rizzi served in the role from 1992 to 2001, then again, after his successor resigned, from 2004 to 2008.)“Let’s be honest: Carlo, with his name, is going to be used around the world mostly for the Italian repertory,” Epstein said. “But in Wales he did ‘Elektra’; he did ‘Rosenkavalier’; he did ‘Peter Grimes’ and ‘The Rake’s Progress.’ He’s a superb theater conductor, in the smallest of small groups of people who really work in the theater.”His Met debut was in “La Bohème,” which he has since done more than 60 times with the company. He led a new “Lucia di Lammermoor” in 1998, a new “Il Trovatore” in 2000 and two new stagings of “Norma,” in 2001 and, starring Radvanovsky, on opening night in 2017. “Medea” was his third time opening a Met season.Yet he remains under the radar in New York. His work this fall has been like his Met career in general: nothing fancy, nothing fussy, just clear, compelling readings. “It’s not anything new or different, just the idea of being musically aware with every dramatic beat,” said the tenor Russell Thomas, who sang the title role in “Don Carlo.” “This is maybe my fourth production, and I never had anybody go into that much detail.”Under Rizzi, “Don Carlo” was sober and weighty.Ken Howard/Met OperaRizzi’s “Medea” had the formality of Gluck, who influenced Cherubini, mixed with hints of the tumultuous “Sturm und Drang” movement to come. “Tosca” was colorful and propulsive; “Don Carlo,” sober and weighty.“The way they play ‘Medea’ is not the way they play ‘Tosca,’” he said. “The flexibility is one of the great things about this orchestra.”Among Rizzi’s upcoming projects is to record orchestral suites he has drawn from “Madama Butterfly” and “Tosca.” In future seasons at the Met, he’s slated to return for, yes, Puccini and Verdi — including more “Bohème” and a revival of “Un Ballo in Maschera.”“I really feel, since we did the ‘Norma’ opening night to now, he’s a much different person,” Radvanovsky said. “He’s more relaxed; I feel he’s more comfortable in his baton skill, his skill with the orchestra. His musical language has really relaxed and grown.”Rizzi said: “I don’t want to sound like an old sage, but I’m always in development. I learn more about conducting every day.” Perhaps unexpectedly, given that he is best known for leading the most familiar works in the repertory, in 2019 he became the artistic director of Opera Rara, a London-based company devoted to underperformed titles.“Carlo is incredibly knowledgeable, musicologically and dramaturgically,” Epstein said. “That’s why this Opera Rara thing is good for him. But he should be the music director of an opera house in Italy. It’s silly he hasn’t. And he should have had a go in this country as music director in one of the main houses. He’s not the ordinary Italian conductor — he’s just not. He’s better.”Fabiano, the tenor, locates in Rizzi “the spirit of these older conductors — Votto, Fausto Cleva, Gavazzeni — who had an inherent knowledge of the repertory and knew deeply the needs of the singer. An understanding of what singers need, and the deep care for the letter of the music, the construction of the music, makes for a very terrific maestro.”And while Rizzi is not the most breathlessly marketed baton, Donald Palumbo, the Met’s chorus master, put it simply: “For me, he’s a star.” 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