Under cruddy November skies, the late Mexican composer Daniel Catán’s “Florencia en el Amazonas” made its Chicago premiere at Lyric Opera Saturday and handed first-nighters an eyeful of magenta sunsets, emerald green foliage and a big warm bath of orchestral color.
This is where the music comes alive in this score: in its evocations of the jungle, as seen from the deck of a fateful cruise down a river of many metaphors. In between the arias, duets, trios and quartets, the best of which dispel the periodic languid spells of the libretto, every capital-R Romantic impulse in Catán’s trilling, alluring instrumention purrs: C’mon in! The water’s fine.
Lyric’s marketing makes note of this being the company’s first Spanish-language mainstage season title. That distinction goes in the file marked IT’S ABOUT TIME. Catán’s opera, inspired by (but not based specficially on) the rhapsodic magical-realist creations of Gabriel García Márquez, notably “Love in the Time of Cholera,” made its bow a generation ago, in a 1996 Houston Grand Opera commission, co-produced and later presented by Los Angeles Opera and Seattle Opera.
It has since been produced all over the world, in America from Florida to Utah to the University of Illinois and Indiana University. (Catán’s 1991 opera “Rappaccini’s Daughter” received its U.S. premiere in San Diego, and was the first Mexican opera seen in a major U.S. production; earlier this year, Chicago Opera Theater staged a site-specific “La Hija de Rappaccini” at the Field Museum.)
At the time of his death in 2011, the composer was working on a new opera based on the 1941 Frank Capra film “Meet John Doe,” a story of incipient homegrown American fascism practically begging for full-throated operatic treatment. He left behind behind roughly 75 percent of that score. The beloved Italian film “Il Postino” served as the basis of an earlier Catán opera. His populist tastes traveled well.
That’s surely true of “Florencia en el Amazonas,” which director Francesca Zambello — who was there at the beginning, staging the Houston premiere a generation ago, and has staged a fine, confident production here — cheerfully characterized in one interview as “a great opera for newbies.”
The time is the early 20th century; one character, the ship captain’s nephew, dreams of becoming an airplane pilot, so not too too early. Librettist Marcela Fuentes-Berain confines the narrative almost entirely to the steamboat known as El Dorado, heading for the city of Manaus in the Brazilian Amazonas region.
There, after an absence of 20 years, the world-famous operatic soprano Florencia Grimaldi will “unlock a long-silent opera house” with her magical voice. Traveling incognito on the ship, she is one of several passengers yearning for lost love.
Journalist Rosalba hopes to land the first-ever interview with La Grimaldi; meantime, en route to Manaus, she hopes to figure out her feelings regarding the ship captain’s nephew, whose warring impulses are best expressed by one vocal line: “If I ever fall in love, it will be with you.”
Others on board include the long-married couple Paula and Alvaro, desperate to hear La Grimaldi sing. Our spirit animal for the journey, Riolobo, is a little bit Prospero, a little bit Caliban — a combination of first mate and shapeshifter. He turns into a flying “river spirit” when bad weather comes crashing in at the end of Act 1. Throughout “Florencia en el Amazonas” a dancing chorus of river spirits, led by the riveting, liquid yet rock-solid presence of Akua Noni Parker,serve variously as piranhas, logs causing a logjam and other non-human forms.
Twenty years earlier, La Grimaldi was a diva on the rise who lost her heart to a butterfly hunter whose exploits led him deep, deep into the jungle. He never returned. Much of this title character’s material sticks, narrowly and doggedly, to this single theme of recapturing an old love that may be gone forever, or may not.
The leaps into magical-realist territory culminate with a whopper at the climax of Act 2. Director Zambello doesn’t literalize the wondrous transformation at hand (wondrous or corny, depending on your tastes). Rather, she lets it be, and leaves it unexpectedly open-ended. Satisfying? Not entirely. But for those final minutes, underneath and then replacing La Grimaldi’s vocal lines, Catán’s music grows quietly intense and, for a change, suspensefully restrained. There’s a lot of froth and thrash in Catán’s score elsewhere. Here, those in the first few rows could see first-hand conductor Jordan de Souza’s masterly control of the mood and pacing in the crucial final passages. Even if you didn’t buy the butterfly bit (we’ll keep it vague, though scenic designer Peter J. Davison certainly doesn’t) you could hear the magic.
The Chicago company is led by soprano Ana María Martínez, who works, valiantly, to dramatize the journey and make sense of La Grimaldi’s challenging, sometimes oddly motivated vocal leaps. As the young maybe-lovers, tenor Mario Rojas (Arcadio) and especially soprano Gabriella Reyes (Rosalba) are treated to the most Puccini-y of the duets. This is a score indebted to three major influences: Italian Romanticism in the Puccini and Verdi vein; Benjamin Britten’s sea-and-spray titans “Peter Grimes” and “Billy Budd”; and to what might be called “Hollywood Water Voyage Music,” from Korngold to Herrmann. Catán was no snob about the movies, and like most operatic composers (though not only operatic, in his case), he worked like a far-flung magpie, pulling ideas from all over and making something new or new-ish in return.
“Florencia en el Amazonas” will likely hit the spot for those who like their opera straightforward, good-looking and relatively pocket-sized (a tick over two hours). This month’s other Lyric Opera offering, the witty, arresting “Magic Flute” orginated by Komische Oper Berlin, represents more of a conceptual risk, shrewdly sustained (and beautifully sung) across a significantly altered text that nonetheless let Mozart drive the action, even with a ton and a half of animation fighting for the steering wheel. The more Lyric Opera of Chicago can switch gears within a season, the better. Lyric probably could’ve gotten around to doing right by Catán earlier than 2021. But who’s counting.
Review: “Florenica en el Amazonas”
When: Through Nov. 28
Where: Lyric Opera House, 20 N. Wacker Drive
Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes
Tickets: $39-$319 at 312-827-5600 or lyricopera.org
COVID protocol: Lyric Opera of Chicago requires proof of COVID-19 vaccination, as well as masks in the opera house.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune
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