So far, The Hours has polarised opera audiences. For some, it’s an enveloping fusion of intricate dramaturgy and symphonic orchestration. For others, it’s another soft-centred example of American neo-tonalism. My admiration for composer Kevin Puts and librettist Greg Pierce began upon opening the score, drawn in by three intertwined tales of people on the brink of suicide, all unfolding in a sumptuously textured ecosystem – suggesting dreamier moments of John Adams’s Harmonielehre and Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé.

It’s an adult opera, best appreciated by those ‘of a certain age’ who have lived at least one of the three stories, initially created in the acclaimed 1998 Michael Cunningham novel, the 2002 film starring Meryl Streep and now the opera. First heard in 2022 in a Philadelphia Orchestra concert version, the opera had a full Phelim McDermott production at the Metropolitan Opera, where this Erato set was recorded live. A DVD release might make more sense, particularly since this sound-only recording is issued without a printed libretto, though not always knowing what’s happening is part of the opera’s allure.

The title comes from the 1925 Virginia Woolf novel Mrs Dalloway (originally called The Hours), which is the connection among the plot lines. The hypersensitive Woolf (Joyce DiDonato) writes the book under the nervous watch of her husband, while in 1949 the American housewife Laura Brown (Kelli O’Hara) is reading the book in a state of suicidal depression. Decades later, her grown-up son Richard (Kyle Ketelsen) is a celebrated New York writer but is stricken with Aids and longs to die despite the protest of his caretaker Clarissa (Renée Fleming), nicknamed Mrs Dalloway since the Woolf character’s first name is also Clarissa. The film was fearlessly realistic and hard to watch. But the opera’s prevailing benevolence has the opposite effect.

The world of the opera mostly takes place inside the heads of the three heroines. Ostensibly, the action in any given scene is baking a cake, buying flowers, but choruses – often treated as part of the orchestra – represent life-and-death inner thoughts and impulses. Airy textures with sustained pianissimo notes allow the stories to flow into one another. In fact, one of the few references to the external world comes with the first Laura Brown scene with 1950s pop music harmonies. More abstractly, Clarissa’s modern New York life has busy crowded textures. Virginia Woolf is spare, conveying the mental clarity needed to write Mrs Dalloway.

Nervous, constant underlying rhythms in all three stories suggest heartbeats that are taken for granted in everyday life, until Richard’s climactic Act 2 suicide. ‘I’m only alive in my past’, he proclaims. His leap from his apartment window happens in complete silence, followed by a series of ultra-fortissimo vocal-orchestral thunderclaps.

Thereafter, the opera has virtually no pulse, but clears the way for a trio sung by the three women (how could there not be one?) that owes little to Der Rosenkavalier and is its own thing, ending with the words ‘You are not alone’. The directness is such that The Hours takes its place among the music theatre works that speak effectively to our times, others being Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, Adam Guettel’s Days of Wine and Roses (on Broadway) and Philip Venables’s 4.48 Psychosis.

All three divas are at their respective peaks, but in different ways. Fleming sounds just fine in her mid-60s. And though her diction is inconsistent, the performance conveys the inner life of her character in ways that recall her great moments as Desdemona. DiDonato has always had an affectingly fast vibrato, and it’s ideal for the vulnerability of the thorny, barely-able-to-stand-herself Virginia Woolf. O’Hara seems vocally overtaxed in her big-aria moments, though in narrative passages she’s the best of the three. Top vocal honours, though, go to Ketelsen as Richard, who brings objective dignity to his anguished, end-of‑life world view, thanks partly to his perfect diction (yes, perfect). Luxury casting in secondary roles is less successful. As Clarissa’s girlfriend, Denyce Graves is a magnetic stage presence but the voice by itself on this recording sounds out of sorts. As Richard’s ex-boyfriend, William Burden is guilty of over-emoting. And Yannick Nézet-Séguin? It’s widely agreed that he was born to conduct Ravel, but that kind of skill and sensitivity is put to greater use in The Hours.