Puts, Kevin

Subterms

    Latest story

    138 Shares199 Views

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

    by

    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

    More stories

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Jaap van Zweden Bids Farewell, and Other Classical Highlights

      by

      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

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Music

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

      by

      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

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Music

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

      by

      “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

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

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

      by

      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

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Review: ‘The Hours’ Will Bring Renée Fleming Back to the Met

      by

      Kevin Puts’s new opera had its premiere in a Philadelphia Orchestra concert presentation before coming to New York this fall.PHILADELPHIA — Three women are left alone onstage.The orchestra is low as they begin to sing. Their voices (two soprano, one mezzo-soprano) gradually swell and intertwine in a radiant, aching trio about all that separates them from one another — and their essential union.This is, famously, the ending of Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” which five years ago was the last work the superstar soprano Renée Fleming sang at the Metropolitan Opera. But her performance, a farewell to the canonical repertory, did not mark a full retirement. Fleming said she would continue to concertize, and left open the possibility of returning to staged opera for new pieces written with her in mind.So on Friday here in Philadelphia, it felt like a moving nod to her distinguished career that a radiant, aching trio of women (two sopranos, one mezzo) left alone onstage — a trio about all that separates them from one another, and their essential union — is also the coda to “The Hours,” which will bring Fleming, for whom it was composed, back to the Met this fall.There the work, Kevin Puts’s new adaptation of the 1998 novel and 2002 film about the reverberations of Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” in the lives of three characters in different places and eras, will be conducted by the company’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. And on Friday, at the Kimmel Center, Nézet-Séguin led its world premiere in a concert presentation with another ensemble he leads, the Philadelphia Orchestra.With a libretto by Greg Pierce, “The Hours” is even prettier and more sumptuous than “Silent Night,” a grandly scored yet sweetly humble opera about a cease-fire over Christmas during World War I, for which Puts won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012. The new work is, like “Silent Night,” direct, effective theater, with a cinematic quality in its plush, propulsive underscoring, its instinctive sense for using music to move things along. For all its shifts and overlaps of time and place, it’s an entirely clear piece, its sound world never too busy or difficult — never too interesting, perhaps — to muddy the waters.The opera’s composer, Kevin Puts, grips Nézet-Séguin’s hands after the performance, with Greg Pierce, who wrote the libretto, behind him.Jessica GriffinFleming has the role Meryl Streep played in Stephen Daldry’s film: Clarissa Vaughan, a prosperous book editor in late 1990s New York City who is preparing a party for her friend, a famous poet dying of AIDS. She suffers regrets and despair, as do other two women: Laura Brown (the acclaimed Broadway soprano Kelli O’Hara), a Los Angeles housewife in 1949; and Woolf herself (the mezzo Jennifer Johnson Cano on Friday, but Joyce DiDonato at the Met) in a London suburb, trying to surmount her depression long enough to write “Mrs. Dalloway” in the early 1920s.In Michael Cunningham’s delicate novel, these three are linked in a carefully wrought knit of Woolfian prose and coincidences, among them that Clarissa Vaughan shares a first name with the title character of “Mrs. Dalloway,” who in Woolf’s novel — which Laura Brown is reading as she fights anomie and the urge toward suicide — is also making a party.The film version is far more lugubrious, not least in Philip Glass’s melodramatically undulating score, which so defines the movie’s mood — its dusky, urgent strings inseparable from Nicole Kidman’s Woolf and her puttied aquiline nose striding off to drown themselves — that there is something brave in another composer taking on this material.Puts has gotten from Glass’s Minimalism a taste for using repeated figurations as a kind of sonic carpeting, but his repetitions are much less insistent. The opera begins in a watery blur, with a choir, sounding simultaneously floating and precise, chanting fragments of Woolf’s classic opening line: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”The events of the opera, as in the book and film, are studiedly modest, taking place in a single day. Clarissa goes to the florist, visits her dying friend, and muses on what her life would have been like had she not, years ago, broken off a budding romance with him. Woolf chats with her husband about page proofs, forms phrases and greets her sister’s family. Laura attempts to bake a cake for her husband’s birthday before escaping to a hotel to read alone.With each of the two acts unfolding in an unbroken stream, Puts moves smoothly between parlando sung conversation and glowing lyrical flights. The stylization of opera allows him to bring his characters together in the same musical space, even if they are otherwise unaware of one another. So there are, for example, ravishing duets for Woolf and Laura, one in which they sing lines from “Mrs. Dalloway” in close harmony over trembling strings. Puts is acute in using the chorus, which will presumably be offstage in a full production, to convey further shadows of these women’s interior lives.Prepared with remarkably limited rehearsal time for a two-hour work with a substantial cast, this was a lush yet transparent account of the score, performed with polish and commitment. The opera leans heavily on this orchestra’s storied opulent strings, as well as on its characterful winds and brasses, and precision at a large battery of percussion instruments (including a celesta, used frequently, in a cliché of dreaminess).Puts’s work is attractive and skillful. Yet much of it, despite lots of activity and ostensible variety in the orchestra and among the singers, gives a sense of engulfing sameness of musical texture and vocal approach. The arias, if you set the words aside, are more or less interchangeable: pristinely soaring. The saturated orchestral colors recall Nelson Riddle’s symphonic pop arrangements and Samuel Barber’s gently reflective soprano monologue “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” But Riddle songs are just a couple of minutes long; “Knoxville,” about 15. Over a couple of hours, it’s lovely but wearying.The ’50s style for Laura’s world — mild Lawrence Welk-type swing, choral writing like TV jingles — feels obvious. And some moments of highest drama smack of the overkill that mars the film, as when the threat of Woolf’s devastating headaches is marked by pummeling darkness, yawning brasses and instrumental screams.New fantasy sequences, demarcated in concert with sudden shifts of lighting, telegraph a bit too crudely how much these women want to run from their lives. Woolf’s imaginary interaction with a contemporary male novelist who speaks about how much she’s meant to him — an invention of the libretto — is cloying and overwrought, drenched in bells.The more intimate and understated, the better for Puts’s music, and the cast embodies both those qualities. Cano sings with mellow sobriety — and, in Woolf’s darkest moments, stricken intensity. O’Hara’s voice is silvery at the top and full in the middle, her pain registering gracefully.As Clarissa’s poet friend, Richard, the baritone Brett Polegato sang with lightly sardonic airiness. The tenor William Burden sounded shining and eager as his old lover, Louis. The tenor Jamez McCorkle, the mezzo Deborah Nansteel and the bass-baritone Brandon Cedel were steady, sonorous presences as the main characters’ much put-upon romantic partners.Fleming began with some paleness of tone, but grew in command through the evening, past her characteristic propriety to a kind of somber nobility. Clarissa dominates the opera’s final scenes, when “The Hours” is at its finest: the emotions sincere and persuasive, the music fervent.And at the end, the three women come together, perceiving one another in a way they cannot in the novel or film and arriving at a simple moral: “Here is the world and you live in it, and you try.” There was poignancy in having a great diva, now 63, singing the nostalgic leading role, a woman taking in all she has done — and realizing she still has more to give.The HoursPerformed at the Kimmel Center, Philadelphia. More

    • 50 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      A Day of Divas

      by

      Two star sopranos, Renée Fleming and Sonya Yoncheva, held court in two of New York’s grandest venues on Sunday.A little imperiousness? A lot of extravagance? A touch of the supernatural?You could try to come up with the recipe for a diva, but you just know one when you see it. Or hear it: In an appraisal of André Leon Talley this weekend, the New York Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman described his words as those “of a diva, uttered at a time when divas were going out of style.”Out of style, perhaps, but not out of existence. In fact, I read that appraisal on Sunday as I was getting ready for a day of rare diva alignment, with two star sopranos holding court in two of New York’s grandest venues: Renée Fleming at Carnegie Hall in the afternoon, and Sonya Yoncheva at the Metropolitan Opera in the evening.If you were looking for evidence of the demise of the diva — at least of the stereotypical variety — it’s true, neither of these seemingly genial, generous women came across as imperious. And clutch your pearls: Fleming didn’t even change gowns at intermission.But divadom still shows signs of life. It’s in tiny things, like this sentence in the program at Carnegie: “Ms. Fleming’s jewelry is by Ann Ziff for Tamsen Z.” And at the Met, when Yoncheva sang the phrase “ta première larme” (“your first tear”) in a Chausson song, she slowly raised her hand to her face, as if she really believed she was wiping that larme away. Sometimes, even in opera, it’s the gesture that makes the diva.In a gesture of becoming modesty, Fleming shared a reasonably crowded stage for the most prominent part of her concert: the New York premiere of “Penelope,” an account of the wife who waits very, very patiently for Homer’s Odysseus to return from the Trojan War.The soprano Renée Fleming, center, was joined on Sunday at Carnegie Hall for the New York premiere of André Previn and Tom Stoppard’s “Penelope” by (from left) the pianist Simone Dinnerstein, the Emerson String Quartet and the actress Uma Thurman.Chris LeeLeft unfinished at the death of its composer, André Previn, in 2019, the piece was stitched together from manuscript sketches and drafts of Tom Stoppard’s text. The 40-minute result is as talky as a Stoppard play but far less sparkling or affecting. Its tone mostly pseudo-archaic, this is pretty much just an “Odyssey” in extreme digest, lightly backed by the Emerson String Quartet and the pianist Simone Dinnerstein.There are so many words that many of them were assigned to be spoken, to shorten the running time. Thus the title role was split between a singer and an actress (at the premiere three years ago and here, the movie star Uma Thurman).Thurman is a natural at intoning amid the wispy thatches of underscoring, and she sometimes tries to inject some attitude into the dry libretto. But it’s never quite clear why the role has been divided. Couldn’t a single performer just shift between speaking and singing? The bifurcation works only to dilute interest in both parties.Fleming is game, even if she doesn’t get to take lyrical flight: The soprano part is almost entirely recitative — sung narration — and never blossoms into aria or gives us any real sense of Penelope’s character or emotions. There are reminders of Previn’s stylish facility, as when a quietly swirling little quartet interlude slips into a minor-key whisper of “Here Comes the Bride” before modulating, almost quicker than you can hear it, into gentle satisfaction. But mostly the music seems scant and exhausted trying to keep up with Stoppard.It followed intermission; earlier, the Emerson played Barber’s 1936 Quartet, dedicating it from the stage to Roger Tapping, the superb Juilliard Quartet violist, who died last week. Dinnerstein rolled out the deliberate arpeggios and rushing surges of Philip Glass’s “Mad Rush,” and accompanied Fleming in a set of five songs altogether more memorable than “Penelope.” The first, Grieg’s lively “Lauf der Welt,” didn’t play to this singer’s mellow strengths, but his “Zur Rosenzeit” very much did.Fleming is 62, but there is still considerable richness in the middle of her voice, and her dips into low notes were done cleanly, without the syrupy scooping for which she was once often criticized. In the wistful quiet of “Zur Rosenzeit” she was moving, almost vaporizing the second syllable in “meinem Garten” (“my garden”) for the touching effect of the past vanishing as she remembered it. Fauré’s “Les Berceaux” had discreet, dusky power.And she was earnestly impassioned in “Evening,” Kevin Puts’s new setting of a Dorianne Laux poem, most charming in a middle section with a Joni Mitchell vibe: a deliberate, repetitive piano riff anchoring a free and easy vocal line. (Fleming takes the Meryl Streep role in Puts’s coming operatic adaptation of “The Hours.”)Yoncheva’s solo recital on the Met stage was a sign that she had swiftly risen to become one of the company’s core artists.Ken Howard/Met OperaAt the Met, Yoncheva was given one of the dearest gifts the company can bestow on a valued artist: a solo recital on its stage. And at 40, she has become valued with dizzying swiftness. Though she jumped into a few memorable revivals starting in 2013, it was only when she opened the 2015-16 season, in Verdi’s “Otello,” that she cemented her place in this house; at the end of February, she will star in a new production of “Don Carlos.”On Sunday she displayed the ease with which she can fill even the vast Met with an encompassing mood: darkly nostalgic and death-haunted, as you’d expect from her melancholy repertory. Even her sensuality brooded, compellingly joyless; Malcolm Martineau’s relative effervescence at the piano placed her gifts in high relief.Her voice is supple but lean. It feels like an instrument, in the most literal sense: a vehicle of expression rather than a remarkable sound in its own right. It has a low center of gravity and a quality of intimacy; Yoncheva gives the sense of singing to herself even when she’s not being soft.As she began with a set of French songs by Duparc, Viardot, Chausson, Donizetti and Delibes, her high notes were thin and stiff. Indeed, throughout the evening those notes above the staff were a problem, mostly when she had to rise to them through a long musical line. Stabbed out of the air, loud ones had startling fullness and clarity.But from the first number — Duparc’s “L’Invitation au voyage” — her interpretive intentions were intriguing, as she stretched the poem’s vision of “luxury, calm and delight” into a clear, forbidding premonition of the afterlife. With Yoncheva, details are everything: In Duparc’s “Au pays où se fait la guerre,” the repetitions of “son retour” (“his return”) at the end of each verse had a different gauzy texture, subtly increasing the complexity and tension of the illusion that a lover will come back.A silvery sheen to “printemps” in Chausson’s “Le temps des lilas” gave a brief impression of dewy spring; there was grandeur in Donizetti’s “Depuis qu’une autre a su te plaire” without overkill. The Spanish-style ornaments in Delibes’s “Les filles de Cadix” weren’t dashed off for smiles, but were sung with intensity, turning what could be a throwaway number into an unlikely burning drama.In a second half of Italian songs, Yoncheva was dreamy in Puccini, though her voice wanted greater size and juiciness to fill out her epic conception of “Canto d’anime.” In works by Martucci, Tosti and Verdi, her phrasing had confidence and style, a carefully constructed but persuasive evocation of naturalness; though she had a music stand in front of her throughout the evening, she sang with focus and commitment.Tosti’s “Ideale” was particularly striking, its finale building from faintness to climax. Warmly received, she moved to classic arias for encores: a refreshingly unsappy “Donde lieta uscì” from “La Bohème”; a genuinely sexy, insinuating “Carmen” Habanera; and “Adieu, notre petite table” from “Manon,” tenderly mused.Oh, and she spent the first half in a black gown, billowing above the bodice, and the second in white — shiny satin throughout, a dream of a diva. More