Daniel Catán’s “Florencia en el Amazonas” made a surprising comeback Saturday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Well, it was surprising to me, anyway. I never thought I’d see it again after its Los Angeles Opera premiere in 1997. It wasn’t bad, exactly. It just didn’t seem interesting enough to survive beyond the first few performances promised by its commission.
But “Florencia” was recorded, and opera companies here and there and in South America kept putting it on. Catán went on to compose a couple of more operas, including the successful and I think more accomplished “Il Postino” and was working on an operatic version of Frank Capra’s “Meet John Doe” when he died in 2011.
Catán’s aims were modest but admirable. He wanted to write operas that singers could sing, that ordinary audiences could understand and enjoy, that worked onstage. He was what used to be called “a man of the theater.” As such, his musical idiom was conservative but not regressive.
The music of “Florencia” draws on Ravel (especially the more florid parts of “Daphnis and Chloe”), Debussy, perhaps Britten and certainly Puccini. The opera tells the story of a boat trip up the Amazon, among the passengers an opera diva returning to find a lost love and open an opera house. So naturally the orchestra, bolstered by exotic percussion, paints a verdant and watery and bird-rich scene and the singers float above it in Puccini-esque dreaminess and splendor.
The libretto, by Marcela Fuentas-Berain with an assist by no less than Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, delves into the magical realism of the celebrated author and seems rather stilted and predictable, with the requisite squabbling older couple, the young lovers not yet a couple (one a writer, the other longing for freedom and broader views), the captain, the diva and a host/river spirit all filling in slots in the storyline. The events along the way – a storm, a man overboard, cholera – are not unexpected. The ending is anticlimactic.
Yet it all moves along pleasantly and sensibly enough, if a little bit monotonously. “Florencia” seems to be in one tempo (moderato) and in one or two moods. It’s hard to get excited about, but then neither does it offend.
Actually, the weakest part of this performance is the visual. Francesca Zambello’s original production has been dressed up with projections front and back – the boat looks as if it’s moving up the river, through the jungle – but it’s not enough in this day and age. It looks, sorry to say and no offense, cheap.
The boat, workable enough as a set as it turns on stage to reveal different platforms and rooms, appears to be made out of plywood in some semi-talented craftsman’s garage. The projections are pretty, but not exactly breathtaking (which is what is wanted). The glittered-up dancers in loin cloths in the river representing spirits and such are like something out of lower Cecil B. DeMille.
In short, the magical realism in the opera is handled in workaday fashion when state-of-the-art special effects might have transported the opera and its audience to another world.
But that’s complaining about something that’s not there; what is, as said, works modestly enough and there’s no reason to groan, an achievement in itself.
As Florencia Grimaldi, the Chilean soprano Verónica Villarroel was properly regal in bearing, singing in golden tones and stately phrases. One wondered, at times, if some of the music was a little low for her.
Mexican tenor Arturo Chacón-Cruz made an aptly ardent and idealistic sailor, Arcadio, without forcing his voice to do all the work. With svelte phrases and gleaming high notes, the American soprano Lisette Oropesa introduced a primly earnest Rosalba, a writer looking to pen a book on the diva.
Baritone José Carbó provided a rugged Ríolobo, a kind of god in the machine, and bass-baritone David Pittsinger a dignified Captain. Mezzo-soprano Nancy Fabiola Herrera (Paula) and baritone Gordon Hawkins (Álvaro) gave ample voice(s) to the senior couple. Say this for Catán, he gives them all plenty to sing.
Conductor Grant Gershon, artistic director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale who has turned in some excellent work for L.A. Opera over the years, does it again, presiding gracefully and exactingly in the pit.
Contact the writer: 714-796-6811 or tmangan@ocregister.com
