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.”
“The Hours” is based on Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, and on Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film adaptation. But the opera may be too loyal to its sources (and too awed by Woolf’s genius). Passing moments in the book are given undue importance here. The scene in the flower shop, with its tacky coloratura writing and pandering allusions to Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte,” the role of the Man Under the Arch, the omniscient chorus — all of it could easily be cut. While we’re at it, the staging could lose the dancers, too.
When Puts and Greg Pierce, the librettist, move away from literalism and embrace opera’s specific advantages as a medium, the work soars. The weaving of Laura’s and Virginia’s private agonies in a duet across time and space, a simultaneity more easily achieved here than in books or movies, creates an empathy that the audience feels even if the two of them cannot. Here, as elsewhere on Sunday, the orchestra played with wonderful fluidity, shape and character under the baton of Kensho Watanabe.
It is obvious that Puts tailored the lead roles to each of the three women. In the plainest moments of sung dialogue, their voices retained a lovely succulence. Still, at the high end of their ranges, O’Hara’s voice strained and DiDonato’s shuddered uncomfortably, and Fleming was hard to hear unless the orchestration was thinned out.
Despite the attention lavished on the women, it’s really the poet Richard, dying of AIDS and fed up with his life, who gives the piece its tragedy. The bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen sang with a darkly handsome tone and acted with wry, rending despair.
In the opera’s final moments, the women come together after Richard’s death. “Here is the world and you live in it,” they sing with compassionate simplicity. There’s a kindness to the moral, to the idea that we are enough. If only this gorgeous piece took its own advice to heart.
The Hours
Through May 31 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org.