The hours of our days are so full of fluff: buying flowers, baking cakes, string at a blank page hoping words will appear there. Think about it too much, and it will drive you to distraction — or worse.
“The Hours” was the working title of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel “Mrs. Dalloway,” in which the title character bustles about London in preparation for a party at her home; meanwhile, and elsewhere, a battle-scarred World War 1 veteran, Septimus Warren Smith, hallucinates and commits suicide.
And it’s the title of a new opera, premiered in 2022 by New York City’s Metropolitan Opera, starring mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, soprano Kelli O’Hara and, making her return to the Met specially for this work, soprano Renée Fleming.
Grand Teton Music Festival and Jackson Hole Center for the Arts present Kevin Puts’ operative treatment of the material for its next “The Met: Live in HD” presentation Sunday in the Center Theater.
…Puts and the Met add a lush and evocative orchestral score to further enrich an already dense exploration of our own personal sense of the passage of time, the ebb and flow of grief and love, the dimensions of anxiety and depression, and the fine degree of measurements that define the brink of insanity and suicide.
