By SUDEEP REDDY And JOE LIGHT

The job market is showing signs of life, though its slow recovery suggests unemployment will remain high for years to come.

Employers added 162,000 jobs in March, the biggest monthly gain in three years, with one-third of the growth coming from the government’s hiring of 48,000 temporary workers for the 2010 Census. Despite those gains, the jobless rate held steady at 9.7% as new workers entered the job market and people who had previously quit the labor force returned.

The average length of unemployment rose last month to the highest point since record keeping began in 1948: more than 31 weeks. The number of workers out of work for six months or more rose sharply.

The latest report, which marks the third month since November in which payrolls increased, indicates the labor market is pulling out of a deep downturn that slashed more than eight million jobs since the recession hit in late 2007.

“It confirms that the economy has turned an important corner,” says J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. chief economist Bruce Kasman. “It’s been growing for a while, but I think what we’re seeing is that this growth is now broadening out to include jobs.”

The stock market was closed Friday for a holiday, but the jobs report sent stock futures climbing during a morning session. As investors anticipate a stronger economy—and look ahead to an eventual Federal Reserve rate hike—they pushed down Treasury debt prices, sending the yield on 10-year Treasury notes, the benchmark for corporate and consumer borrowing, to 3.94%, the highest since June.

Among those who have landed jobs lately is New York Web developer Philip John Basile, although, as with many other new hires, it is a temporary six-month assignment with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. He had been searching in earnest for three months, he says. “I’m still looking for a permanent job, but this is a good middle ground,” he says.

Many employers are reluctant to hire until they see stronger evidence of an economic recovery. Private-sector payrolls increased by 123,000 in March, but much of that boost was a bounce back from employment depressed in February by snowstorms. The government said overall payrolls increased by an average of 54,000 a month over the last three months.

The economic recovery so far remains heavily reliant on government support, which is visible in the jobs numbers. Hiring for the decennial census is expected to add hundreds of thousands of temporary jobs in the coming months. Other forms of government intervention also remain crucial. The housing sector’s boost is being driven in part by tax breaks and extensive government support for the mortgage market. And last year’s $787 billion stimulus is temporarily preventing even deeper job losses in fields from construction to education.

“We don’t expect it to get worse, but we’re not seeing a rebound yet,” says Donald Stone Jr., chief executive of Dewberry & Davis, a Fairfax, Va.-based engineering firm. The closely held company is hiring 30 right now, but doesn’t expect employment to return to its peak anytime soon, Mr. Stone says. Dewberry employed 1,800 in 2009, about 10% below its prerecession high.

While stimulus projects have bolstered its business with the federal government, state and local governments still seem strapped for cash, Mr. Stone says. Dewberry’s private development work also has remained scarce. “Projects have been very sporadic and certainly not what I would call a rebound,” he says.

Catholic Health Initiatives, a nonprofit national health-care provider based in Denver, is taking a wait-and-see approach to hiring. Over the last 18 months, the company laid off about 2,000, leaving its work force at 70,000, says chief operating officer Michael Rowan. With inpatient admissions down 3.5% this year, Mr. Rowan expects staffing to grow only 1%, and that will happen through acquisitions.

Health care was one of the few sectors adding jobs during the downturn. But in March, the gains were broad-based.

The retail sector added 14,900 jobs. Temporary employment—a positive indicator for the labor market, since many employers increase temp hiring as a prelude to adding permanent jobs—increased by 40,200. Construction added jobs for the first time since mid-2007, although the gains likely were the result of a bounce back from February’s weather slowdown. Manufacturing added 17,000 jobs, the third straight month of gains.

Replacing the more than eight million jobs lost since the recession started likely will take much of the next decade. The economy needs to create at least 100,000 jobs a month just to keep the unemployment rate flat, due to population growth. Because of the downturn, millions of Americans quit searching for work or dropped out of the labor force. A broader measure of unemployment, which includes people who stopped looking for work and those settling for part-time jobs, rose to 16.9% in March.

The improving economy is certain to draw more job seekers back into the market, one factor likely to keep the unemployment rate from dropping quickly. The labor force—those working or looking for work—grew by 398,000 in March, the third straight monthly increase.

Federal Reserve officials expect the jobless rate to remain above 9% through this year and above 8% throughout 2011. The large pool of available labor is likely to constrain wage growth in the coming years. The report showed that average hourly earnings declined 0.1% during the month, although the average work week and total hours worked grew. For that reason, even with the latest turn toward job growth, the Fed isn’t likely to raise interest rates until late this year at the earliest.

Write to Sudeep Reddy at sudeep.reddy@wsj.com

This hasn’t exactly been the spring of Jordan, Pippen, Gretzky and Lemieux.

This year’s NBA and NHL playoffs have been taken over by the (relatively) unknown and unsung. Because of the surprising play of success-starved teams like the Indiana Pacers, Los Angeles Kings, Philadelphia 76ers and Phoenix Coyotes, this postseason is full of who-dats and what’s-his-faces, while other big-name teams have less-than-household names playing key roles.

Do you have any idea who’s been on your TV every other night for the past month? Below is a quiz, with the answers at the bottom.

By DAVID MERMELSTEIN

New York

The Finnish soprano Karita Mattila brings extraordinary intensity to her operatic roles. But the emotions don’t stop at the footlights. Ms. Mattila is a diva of the old school, high-strung and deeply passionate off stage as well as on. She has enjoyed many triumphs at the Metropolitan Opera since first appearing there in 1990—in Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Puccini—but she may be best known these days as a blond-bombshell Salome and a thoroughly miscast Tosca. More widely praised, at the Met and elsewhere, have been her portrayals of the anguished title characters in “Jenůfa” and “Kat’a Kabanova” by the Czech composer Leoš Janáček.

On Friday, the soprano adds another Janáček heroine to her Met roster: the formidable, and possibly immortal, opera singer Emilia Marty in “The Makropulos Case.” The run, limited to five performances through May 11, revives for the first time in more than a decade Elijah Moshinsky’s 1996 production, initially mounted with Jessye Norman.

Jeffrey Smith/Lauri Eriksson

Karita Mattila

“I was kind of hesitating, because I knew this wouldn’t be a new production,” Ms. Mattila, age 51, said, perched on a sofa at her hotel near Lincoln Center. Dressed fashionably in a sleeveless gray dress and lilac wrap, her makeup camera-ready, she spoke with a lilting accent that lent her words a songlike quality. “But the original director is coming to redirect it himself. That made a big difference. It’s still a challenge to make it your own. I’ve deserved all the new productions I’ve had. I’m spoiled and so fortunate. It requires a different attitude to do an old production. But it helps enormously to have the original director—and to have done such a good production already.”

She is alluding to Olivier Tambosi’s coolly elegant staging, which had its premiere at the San Francisco Opera in 2010. That production marked her debut as Emilia, and she proved sensational in the demanding role, singing and acting with wit, charm and vast self-confidence. Jiří Bělohlávek conducted those performances, and the Met has retained him for this run as well.

“This is a gift from heaven,” Ms. Mattila said with characteristic overstatement, referring to Mr. Bělohlávek’s presence in the pit. “He understands this music; it’s in his native language. Uta Hagen writes that the director is the actor’s main support. We singers are so lucky that in the best situation we have two support vessels: the conductor and the director, especially if they work well together. And that’s also called heaven—having two wonderful guides.”

The singer’s familiarity with the acting precepts of Uta Hagen—including the famous Six Steps—came thanks to a compatriot who gave her one of Hagen’s books after studying with the pedagogue in New York. “She is my big idol and hero,” Ms. Mattila said of Hagen, who died in 2004, “and she writes things in those books that everybody should read, especially young singers.”

Ms. Mattila’s commitment to dramatic as well as musical values dates to her days at the prestigious Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. “It was part of the schooling,” she said. “I was fortunate to study with fine acting teachers together with the musical side. So from very early on it became as important as singing the part. I was taught to realize that opera is a theater art.”

But knowing and doing are two separate things, and creating a believable character while holding one’s own against an orchestra is no easy task. “The secret is to make it look spontaneous and believable and natural,” Ms. Mattila affirmed. “But the professional part is to be in control. The intellectual study is the preparation, and then you have to leave it. Then it’s all about the here and now and bringing the character to life. You find the physical experience, the way to express yourself, coming from how you understand the music, and then you find the balance—that’s the eternal work of the opera stage.”

Ms. Mattila demurs when the term “singing actress” is mentioned, despite its frequent use as a compliment, whether generally or when applied specifically to her. “I don’t like this title,” she said. “I have far too much admiration for actors to call myself one. I’m an opera singer and very proud of my profession and my training. For me, these are the things that are required of an opera singer. It’s a challenging profession because you must master so many disciplines. It’s old-fashioned to think you can just do it musically; I think that’s only the starting point.”

The finish line, if you will, is the freedom that comes from security. “The feeling that you believe and trust what you’re doing, and you know why you’re doing it—that’s what gives you the so-called artistic freedom on stage,” she said. “So often in the opera you see great singers, but they just aren’t alive somehow. Being flesh and blood on stage, that’s the aim. The goal of the process is to liberate you. That’s art for me.”

The singer recalled once remarking that being an opera singer was boring and that she preferred instead to be an artist. “That is what we are aiming for,” she concluded. “Sometimes it works; sometimes it’s harder work. When you’re free and alive and connected, then the space—the theater—is yours, including the audience. And it becomes a very present moment. Time kind of stops.”

Like all opera singers, Ms. Mattila does not always respond warmly to the productions in which she appears. But she tries hard to suppress such feelings, so as not to sabotage the audience’s reaction. “We don’t need to moralize,” she said of herself and her colleagues. “That’s not our job. Our job is to try to understand what we are creating as these characters. The audience then has every right to like it or not like it, and that’s the way it should be. We shouldn’t let our personal views upset or influence that. But it’s a challenge. Vanity is a hard part of yourself to forget.”

Mr. Mermelstein writes for the Journal on classical music and film.

A version of this article appeared April 26, 2012, on page D4 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Opera’s Drama Queen.

One of the scenes that made ‘Titanic’ the sensation it was. Video courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

If Jack Dawson shines up like a new penny, as Molly Brown says of the suddenly tuxedoed young hero of “Titanic,” James Cameron’s 3-D release of the 1997 meta-mega-hit shines up like gold bullion.

Until now, the process of 3-D conversion—adding the illusion of depth after a film has been shot in conventional 2-D—has mainly been a marketing ploy, a way to raise ticket prices in exchange for a less-than-uplifting experience. But Mr. Cameron has raised the process itself to the level of transformation. As a technological tour de force, his 3-D “Titanic” is constantly astonishing and sometimes magical. More than that, though, this version has deepened and enriched a film that was already rich in emotions and remarkable for its depth of detail.

There’s no way to separate the new technical aspects from the movie’s intrinsic pull, and that’s a good thing; if there were, we’d be talking about mere trickery. Jack’s shouting “I’m the king of the world!” from his perch on the prow was endearing 15 years ago; now it’s even more so, thanks to the passage of time—Leonardo DiCaprio looks so touchingly young—as well as to the addition of a virtual dimension. The below-decks dance was joyous when Rose and Jack did it way back when; now there’s a heightened sense of strong bodies leaping and whirling in vividly crowded steerage quarters that signal, more eloquently than before, the vast distance between the Titanic’s social classes.

“I want to cry already,” a young girl sitting next to me at a sneak preview said to her friend when the first archival shots of the ship filled the screen. Cry she did, but will her tears be the first tricklings of a global flood? A huge cohort of kids has grown up without ever seeing “Titanic” on a big screen; this release may come as a revelation.

On the other hand, the intervening years have brought sweeping changes to the movie business, almost all of them in the direction of accelerated pace, fragmented narrative, toxic irony and the mindless impact of explosions, car crashes and the like. It’s possible that some of “Titanic’s” passages before the collision with the iceberg will strike contemporary audiences as too leisurely, and that today’s kids will be impatient, as swoony fans in 1997 were not, with such borderline caricatures as Billy Zane’s despicable Cal (not to mention Kathy Bates’s volcanic Molly), or such sweetly sappy moments as the one in which Jack, surveying the chaos around him, declares earnestly, “This is bad!” It’s even possible that contemporary moviegoers, steeped in the excesses of computer-generated imagery, will find Mr. Cameron’s elegant 3-D conversion insufficiently excessive, since it doesn’t hurl solid objects or anything else in the audience’s face.

I’d like to believe, though, that the conversion’s main value will be to serve—as technology always should—the essential elements of the film’s success, and that those elements are still potent. “Titanic” was, and remains, a pop-cultural prodigy of unabashed romanticism and unsurpassed spectacle that plays out brilliantly between indispensable bookends in which the aged Rose of the present connects us to the radiant Rose of the past.

At the same time, the new technology—or the existing technology that’s been used to new effect by a masterly technician who’s also a formidable artist—may be a game-changer in its own right. The history of resurgent 3-D, an earlier version of which had a brief heyday in the 1950s, turns on two relatively recent releases. One of them, Mr. Cameron’s sensationally successful “Avatar,” showed that 3-D could be great, but established the principle, or so we thought, that the only authentic 3-D was so-called native 3-D—the process of shooting a film from the outset with two cameras and two lenses. The other, a hapless piece of pseudo-mythology called “Clash of the Titans,” was shot in two dimensions, then hastily bumped up by computer finaglings of such crudity as to establish the principle, or so we thought, that 3-D conversions were to be avoided at all box-office costs.

Now Mr. Cameron himself has sent conventional wisdom packing. How he did it is beyond my comprehension, though his secret must have been some alchemy of supercomputers and superb taste. What’s for sure, though, is that conversion stands, beginning this week, as a thoroughly reputable alternative to native 3-D. For some filmmakers, it’s even the preferred way to go. I say that on the basis of an enlightening conversation earlier this week with Barry Sonnenfeld, who was a cinematographer (on “Raising Arizona” and “Big,” among others) before he became a director of such films as “Get Shorty” and “Men in Black.” He’s currently in postproduction on “Men in Black III,” which opens in May, and which he chose to shoot conventionally, then convert to 3-D.

Mr. Sonnenfeld emphasized the matter of choice during a lunchtime show-and-tell that included photographs of a modern 3-D camera—modern in the sense of all the things it can do, but Rube Goldberg-retro in the sense of an enormous, and enormously cumbersome, rig with ancillary gizmos piled atop gizmos like some Watts Tower of digital power. “Before we started ‘Men in Black III,’” he said, “we did tests with native 3-D that were painfully slow. I like to work quickly. Comedy needs momentum, and native 3-D shooting is a momentum killer. It didn’t make sense to choose a system that worked against the tone of the film.”

His case for conversion, as opposed to going native, went beyond convenience into artistic control. Optical issues, together with the 3-D rig’s physical attributes, would have complicated or precluded the use of the 21mm wide-angle lens he favors for the visual energy it conveys. And native 3-D would have kept him from using film, his favored medium, since all current 3-D rigs record in digital video. Converting “MiB3” in postproduction, he explained, gave him greater control of crucial functions like depth—the degree of 3-D-ness, which can’t be changed once shooting starts in a native 3-D scene. I’ll be eager to see the results when “Men in Black III” makes its debut, but “Titanic” already illustrates how these esoteric techniques can translate to art.

So many moments in Mr. Cameron’s film stand out for intensified visual splendor: Kate Winslet’s Rose, emerging from a car at the pier beneath the slowly rotating disc of her violet hat; Titanic’s prow, jutting out from the screen above the first few rows of seats as the doomed vessel heads for the open sea; the industrial symphony of the boiler rooms, all aflame with the power of pounding pistons; undersea cameras threading their way through barnacled labyrinths that have become haunted surrounds; a panoply of spanking new decks and glittering ballrooms that, released from flatness, open out from the screen to bring us on board. And, toward the end, the downward-gazing spectacle of the ship’s upended stern, a vision of horror with multitiered enhancement. In the face of this 3-D conversion, I’m a new convert.

Corrections & Amplifications: Converting 2-D films into 3-D in postproduction gives a filmmaker greater control over functions such as depth. An earlier version of this article suggested incorrectly that control over screen convergence was more extensive in the conversion process than in native 3-D.

Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com

By SARAH TILTON

STATS: A 7,226-square-foot home with five bedrooms, and 5½ bathrooms, asking $5.5 million, or $761.12 a square foot. Property taxes in 2011 were $30,685. The house was previously listed for $5.9 million.

DETAILS: This Federal home in Old Town Alexandria dates back to 1803, says the owner, who takes pride in the restored moldings and the original woodwork. The formal dining room has Palladian windows at either end. The game room has a fireplace and arched bookcases. A curved staircase with the original mahogany banister leads to the second floor. The master bedroom includes his-and-hers bathrooms as well as his-and-hers walk-in closets. Don’t get attached to the garden furniture as it doesn’t come with the house; neither do the garden pots and statuary.

NEIGHBORHOOD: It’s about 15 minutes to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and about 15 minutes to the White House. Drive 20 minutes to Mount Vernon or walk to the galleries at the Torpedo Factory Art Center.

SELLER:
Leslie Ariail, a partner in a company that manages properties and develops real estate.

WHAT WE PAID: Mrs. Ariail says that she and her late husband, John, paid $2 million for the house in 1994. She says they put more than $1 million into renovating it in 2006 and 2007, adding a summer house (which they also call a gazebo) with limestone columns and a fireplace, expanding the sunroom and taking out the wall between the kitchen and the sunroom.

WHY I’M SELLING: “I’m downsizing,” says Mrs. Ariail, 68. “It’s a big house and my kids all think I need something smaller.” She plans to stay in the neighborhood.

WHAT I’LL MISS: Mrs. Ariail says she will especially miss the library. “It’s a cozy evening room with a fireplace,” she says. She’ll also miss the garden and doubts she’ll have one of “this magnitude” at her next house.

WHAT I WON’T: The squirrels. Mrs. Ariail says they rip the blooms off the tulips and eat the bulbs. “They’re just fuzzy-tailed rodents,” she says. “The world is not perfect and they contribute to that fact.” Mrs. Ariail realizes that if she moves to somewhere else in the neighborhood there will still be squirrels, but notes that they won’t be the same squirrels.

COMPS: Nearby, a 5,192-square-foot home with four bedrooms and 5½ bathrooms is asking $5.9 million.

OTHERS SAY:
Babs Beckwith of McEnearney Associates says the house is well priced considering the size and the original features like the leaded glass windows. Carol Cleary, also of McEnearney Associates, has the listing and says the house is unique because of the quality of the restoration including the moldings and the garden. “The landscaping is perfection,” she says.

Write to Sarah Tilton at sarah.tilton@wsj.com