The Hours, review: the Met proves that opera need not be afraid of Virginia Woolf

This is quite something. On the vast spaces of the Metropolitan Opera stage in New York, Michael Cunningham’s intimate novel, which became an outstanding 2002 film by Stephen Daldry, has metamorphosed into an opera. Librettist Greg Pierce and composer Kevin Puts have taken the three strands of the novel - Virginia Woolf writing in 1923, a depressive Laura Brown reading it in 1949, and Clarissa Vaughan throwing a party for an Aids victim in 1999 - and woven them together into a tapestry of love and loss, as three individuals and their partners make their agonising decisions about whether to live or die.

The three stories of the book do not relate until the last moment, when it emerges that Laura’s small son grew up to be Richard, the Aids victim who chooses death by falling from his New York window (in the opera’s most affecting scene). But three separate strands do not make an opera, and the success of this new work is down to the skill with which librettist and composer link the stories with overlapping narratives, using the multi-voiced ensembles that opera makes possible, underpinned by a superbly integrated staging by Phelim McDermott and his designer Tom Pye. His three domestic settings glide around the stage and are bound together by the commentary of a Greek-tragedy chorus and by (arguably over-elaborate) choreography by Annie-B Parson.

The draw of the show is, however, the three singers for whom it was conceived, and who deliver it with consummate understanding. Joyce DiDonato has surely done nothing finer than her tortured Virginia Woolf: even without the depiction of her drowning that frames the film, she touches tragedy with her obsessive foreknowledge that someone will die. As Laura, on the brink of deserting her husband and son, Kelli O’Hara sings with intense, resonant passion, without quite touching the subtle depths of Julianne Moore in the film. Renée Fleming (marking a surprise return to the Met after her final Rosenkavalier) has total poise and charisma as Clarissa, who so effortfully and fruitlessly strives to do good for Richard. He is vividly sung by Kyle Ketelsen, and all the supporting roles are strongly cast.

Captured in close-up on the HD Live broadcast (I watched it from the Abbeygate Cinema in Bury St Edmunds), directed by Gary Halvorson, these characters hit home: I wonder if that is matched in the live spaces of the opera house? The other question mark that remains is Puts’s music: skilfully eclectic, sometimes filmic, using single-note ostinatos to bind long scenes together and give them momentum, it sometimes switches uneasily into late-Romantic ardour. But it compels attention, right up to the final visionary Straussian trio for the three women facing their different futures. This is a significant addition to the operatic repertory.

BBC Radio 3’s relay is available on BBC Sounds to January 10; for cinema showings see metliveinhd.co.uk