‘Florencia en el Amazonas’ Review: Exuberant Spanish Singing at the Metropolitan Opera

Just the third work in the language ever performed at the New York institution, composer Daniel Catán’s homage to magical realism proved lavish but low on drama.

By 

Heidi Waleson

Nov. 21, 2023 at 5:33 pm ET

Griffin Massey and Mattia Olivieri 

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD

New York

The Mexican composer Daniel Catán’s “Florencia en el Amazonas,” which had its Metropolitan Opera premiere on Thursday, is well-traveled; it has had several productions and been seen in numerous opera houses since its 1996 world premiere at the Houston Grand Opera. There are reasons for its popularity—lush orchestration, ear-pleasing vocal lines, a romantic story—and as one of very few operas in Spanish, it’s a good choice for companies eager to attract Spanish-speaking audiences. It is the Met’s first opera by a Latin American composer and only its third Spanish-language offering (the previous ones were in 1916 and 1926). The resurrected New York City Opera imported a production from Nashville to give the opera its New York premiere in 2016. 

“Florencia” is an homage to the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez. The libretto by Marcela Fuentes-Berain, once a student of Márquez, is about a famous opera singer, Florencia Grimaldi, who is traveling incognito on a boat up the Amazon River to sing in Manaus, Brazil, with the aim of finding her former lover, a butterfly hunter, who has disappeared into the jungle. Her story, and those of the two pairs of lovers who are also on the boat, is vaguely about the triumph of love over ambition—or perhaps the possibility of the co-existence of the two. It’s not clear, and there’s little dramatic tension along the way. The rippling orchestration, colored with flutes and marimbas, rolls along like the Amazon itself, though with little variety in tempo or rhythm; the vocal parts owe a great deal to Puccini. Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin seemed to be enjoying the all-out romantic exuberance of the score—the orchestra was loud and vigorous rather than subtle. 

Ailyn Pérez

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD

The eye-catching production by director Mary Zimmerman leaned into that Márquez-inspired fantasy and exoticism as well as the opera’s riverine and colorful musical character. Riccardo Hernández’s set—a pair of screens undulating diagonally across the stage—suggested the banks of the Amazon with the aid of S. Katy Tucker’s projections of a leafy green jungle. Costume designer Ana Kuzmanić brilliantly created the denizens of the natural world. A group of dancers in big skirts had silvery piranhas on their heads and sprouting from their hips; another cadre wore huge pink flowers and dragged more flowers behind them; two dancers gorgeously arrayed as birds—a heron and a hummingbird—spread their elaborate wings. Puppeteers operated a monkey, an iguana and a caiman. T.J. Gerckens supplied the painterly lighting, enhancing the colorful brilliance of the sky at different times of day. The riverboat itself appeared as individual elements, such as movable deck rails, a deckchair, the helm; in the storm scene at the end of Act 1, dancers in blue overran the boat and its passengers. (Alex Sanchez did the basic choreography.)

The diva Florencia made a fine showcase for Ailyn Pérez: Her soprano, rich and even throughout its range, tackled the role’s soaring, Puccini-esque flights with aplomb. She has three big arias: The opera gets right to the point with her opening salvo about her love affair with Cristóbal, the butterfly hunter, that “made my voice” and how she left him in search of fame, which didn’t satisfy her either. Like Italian, Spanish is an elegant singing language—certainly “a quagmire of anacondas” sounds better in it than in English. In this aria and the despairing one that opens Act 2, Ms. Pérez’s top notes occasionally sounded harsh, but in her concluding showpiece, as her soul seems to experience a mystical reunion with Cristóbal’s, her ecstatic vocal expression was flawless. 

Gabriella Reyes and Mario Chang

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD

She was well-supported by the rest of the cast: Gabriella Reyes (Rosalba) and Mario Chang (Arcadio) were nicely matched as the young lovers who discover each other on the boat, reject love in favor of ambition, and then change their minds. Nancy Fabiola Herrera (Paula) and Michael Chioldi (Alvaro) brought a proper world-weariness to the bickering older couple, who also find each other again. The quartet in which the four played cards had a lively sparkle, a break from the meditative tempos of the rest of the piece. David Pittsinger was the philosophical Captain; Mattia Olivieri (Riolobo) ably filled the narrator’s role. He is a mysterious figure, who, during the storm scene, appeared in a splendid gold, ancient-Aztec-looking costume to implore the gods not to destroy the world.

The rest of Ms. Kuzmanić’s costumes for the humans were as fabulous as the ones for the Amazon creatures—each of the women had several outfits, including colorful early 20th-century-style dresses in sumptuous fabrics and an amusing period swimwear ensemble for Paula. In case we missed the point, butterfly wings unfolded from Florencia’s gown at the end of her final aria. As was the case with Ivo van Hove’s production of “Dead Man Walking,” which opened the season, a lavish, on-point production helped to camouflage the flaws in the work itself. 

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).