The Hours

During the 2022–23 season, prominent American composer Kevin Puts made his Met debut when the company presented the world-premiere production of his fourth opera, The Hours. Adapted from Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel and the celebrated film that it inspired, the compelling new work focuses on a trio of women from three different eras: Virginia Woolf, who is beginning a novel outside London in 1923; Laura Brown, a housewife in the Los Angeles suburbs in 1949; and Clarissa Vaughan, an editor in New York at the end of the 20th century. In this performance recorded as part of the Live in HD series of cinema transmissions, sopranos Reneé Fleming and Kelli O’Hara and mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato star as the opera’s three heroines, with Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin leading an evocative and ultimately life-affirming staging by Phelim McDermott.