Ailyn Pérez shines in Daniel Catán's verdant, shimmering Florencia en al Amazonas

Complaints about contemporary operas normally include “too challenging for the general public” and “where are the melodies?” and “not a euphonious moment in the score”. Well, along comes the Metropolitan Opera premiere of Mexican composer Daniel Catán’s 1996 Florencia en el Amazonas. It was first heard in Houston, and warmly received in New York when I saw New York City Opera present it. 

 Catán studied serialism with Milton Babbitt and proceeded to quickly drop it as a technique. Florencia en al Amazonas sounds and feels like Puccini and Debussy, with murmurs of Ravel and the film music of Technicolor epics. The music glistens like sun on the river; it is graceful and ravishing. And, absolutely tonal. And several critics are decrying how avant garde it is not. Then don’t go. It’s for the public and it’s enchanting.

Marcela Fuentes-Barain's libretto leans towards the “magical realism” made popular by novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The story is relatively straightforward. A small group of people are on a steamboat, sailing up the Amazon in the early 1900s to hear legendary opera singer Florencia Grimaldi (who has not been in her native South America for 20 years) at the reopening of the opera house in Manaus. Florencia is one of the passengers, but she is disguised, yearning to rediscover her true self while searching for her long-lost lover, Cristobal, a butterfly hunter who disappeared into the jungle. 

The others are a writer named Rosalba, who is working on a biography of Florencia, and who finds herself in a nice flirtation with Arcadio, the son of the ship’s Captain, and Paula and Alvaro, a middle-aged couple who have lost interest in one another and are hoping that hearing Florencia will rekindle their romance. And then there is Riolobo, a mystical character who seems very much in touch with nature. Along the way they encounter a storm, which they survive, and when they arrive at Manaus they discover a cholera epidemic and are not permitted to disembark. Rosaba and Arcadio have fallen for one another, Paula and Alvaro are reconciled, and, well, more about Florencia in a minute. In other words, the journey is both literal and metaphorical – the passengers are on a quest for love, fulfillment.

The ship sails through the verdant Amazon, which undulates around it – Nature is the star, not the ship. The sets and costumes, by Riccardo Hernández and Ana Kuzmanić, respectively, are lush and colorful. The latter, whose creations included puppeteers as monkeys and alligators, fish, a pink dolphin and floating flora, not to mention wild headdresses, keep the eye delighted in Mary Zimmerman’s active, warm production. The wall between reality and fantasy blurs beautifully. The neo-Romantic score is ideal for Yannick Nézet-Séguin; he and his glorious orchestra poured forth waves of abundant string and woodwind sounds, in a never-ending arc.

The singing was uniformly excellent. Rosalba and Arcadio, sung by Gabriella Reyes and Mario Chang, were as ardent in their exclamations as they were in their soaring duets – with ringing, climactic high Cs – and arias. Nancy Fabiola Herrera and Michael Chioldi were amusing and eventually quite touching as the bickering Paula and Alvaro. Baritone Greer Grimsley was an authoritative Captain, although he had to battle the orchestra for volume occasionally, and Mattia Olivieri’s Riolobo was potent as both guide and River Spirit.

But it’s difficult not to focus on Ailyn Pérez. Her beautiful soprano has grown in power, but she can still spin soft high notes hypnotically, respecting the line and text in all three of her grand arias. In the opera’s finale – her Liebestod, as it were – she somehow transcended her corporeal self and became the Butterfly that Cristobal sought his whole life. It speaks to the warmth and sensuality of Catán’s sound world that rather than seeming hokey, it is simply gorgeous.