NEW YORK, NY.- Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Metropolitan Operas music director, had stepped onto the podium Thursday evening to begin the performance. The theater was hushed before his downbeat when a voice rang out from a balcony.
Viva la ópera en español! someone shouted, and the audience erupted in applause.
This is what is most notable about the company premiere of Daniel Catáns heavily perfumed Florencia en el Amazonas, starring Ailyn Pérez: It brings a language spoken at home by about a quarter of New York City back to the Met.
Just the third work in Spanish to be presented by the company, Florencia is the first in nearly a century, the first full-length and the first to have been written by a composer from Latin America. Born in Mexico in 1949, Catán studied with serialist master Milton Babbitt, then proceeded to write lush, tonal music that couldnt be more different from his teachers.
Before his death in 2011, Catán specialized in appealingly colorful, politely dull works that harked back to a much earlier era one that ended with the posthumous premiere of the final work by his operas guiding spirit, Giacomo Puccini, in 1926.
That happens to be the year the Met last put on a Spanish-language opera, and theres something amusing in the fact that next to nothing in Florencia, which premiered in Houston in 1996, would have surprised an audience back then. You almost want to applaud the impressive, if perverse, achievement of a score that so thoroughly rejects all the galvanic musical developments since the early 1900s, when the opera is set.
The action hardly complex, but crowded takes place aboard a steamboat in the Amazon rainforest. The passengers are on their way to hear the great diva Florencia Grimaldi sing at the Belle Époque opera house in Manaus, Brazil.
Theres a swooning pair of young lovers and a bickering married couple; a would-be Grimaldi biographer and a mystical narrator; oh, and Florencia, too, somehow unrecognized by everyone else and returning to Manaus in search of her lover, a butterfly hunter she lost long ago.
Marcela Fuentes-Berain, the works librettist, was a student of Gabriel García Márquez, and while the opera is not based directly on any of his books, its debt to his dreamlike magical realism a style that has dominated outside perspectives on Latin American culture to the point of cliche is clear.
The characters emote with the rich, sticky languor of a lava lamp, and none come to life with the force of those in the works to which Catán nods. This is an opera that is, first and foremost, a tribute to opera. If your main character is a famous singer, Puccinis Tosca is an inescapable comparison, and Florencias last name is the same as the lead soprano roles in Giuseppe Verdis Simon Boccanegra.
A recurring, darkly watery tremor motif is borrowed from the music of the phantoms in Puccinis Turandot; in a brief orchestral interlude, a delicate chord that builds from the bottom to the top of the strings is snipped from the opening of Act 3 of his La Bohème.
Played with smooth polish at the Met under Nézet-Séguin, Catáns score endlessly undulates and glitters, in case weve forgotten that were on a river. Mellow combinations of winds blend with sumptuous strings, accented discreetly with brasses for an overall glow. Both composer and conductor are sensitive to singers, not smothering their vocal lines but supporting them.
Those lines are effusively lyrical enough to make Dead Man Walking, the extremely accessible 2000 opera that opened the Mets season, seem like nails on a chalkboard by comparison. Its not that theres anything inherently wrong with nostalgia. But Florencia feels encased in amber, a dead tradition walking.
The piece exudes homogeneous, interchangeable, anesthetized prettiness; you get the sense that any characters music could have just as easily been transferred to anyone else. While its not an unpleasant way to spend a couple of hours, there is nothing approaching vivid characterization or compelling drama the things that mattered to Puccini, that his supreme lyrical gift was serving.
What Florencia does have on its side is brevity, hardly the virtue of most of the new and recent operas that have come to the Met. Dead Man Walking sags under 2 1/2 hours of music the same as Grounded, which will open the companys season next year. Forty-five minutes shorter, Florencia is even more slender than its Puccinian models.
Mary Zimmermans pared-down yet busy, inelegant production suggests locations on board the ship with a few movable pieces, like railings and deck chairs. Riccardo Hernándezs set surrounds the playing space with curving walls flooded with verdant projections to give a sense of the walls of forest flanking the river.
Puppets and sprightly dancers frolicking in fish and bird headdresses Ana Kuzmanić designed the Lion King-esque costumes cutely try to convey the regions exotic explosion of fauna. T.J. Gerckens lighting evokes radiant dawns, dusks and nocturnes.
But Zimmerman is at a loss conjuring mystery. The violent storm at the end of the first act is dominated, oddly, by a gentle fall of red confetti. And while baritone Mattia Olivieri, in his Met debut, sings Riolobo, the narrator, with firm, juicy tone, the staging struggles to capture his status on the blurry boundary between real and magic. The rest of the supporting cast also performs with energy, but Pérez is, appropriately, the uncontested star: wistful, tender and sincere, her voice not enormous but generously delivered, her high notes glistening.
She manages to be both soaring and movingly reserved in Florencias closing aria, and the final moments bring a delightful costuming coup, stylishly lit. The score ends not with Tosca-style fortississimo but in muted, modest quiet a genuinely sweet touch on an often saccharine evening.
Florencia en el Amazonas
Through Dec. 14 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.