Florencia en el Amazonas (Florence in the Amazon)
Daniel Catân (Music); Marcela Fuentes-Berain (Libretto)
Based on the Writings of Gabriel Garcia Márquez)
Opera San José
The romantic drama of multiple loves lost, denied, and finally found intertwine with the Amazon’s alluring myths and fantasy in Opera San José’s magnificent dip into the waters of Daniel Catán’s Florencia en el Amazonas (Florence in the Amazon). This 1996-premiering opera – already widely performed and much loved – is Opera San José’s first production performed in Spanish (with both English and Spanish supertitles) and is a heart-pounding and up-lifting extravaganza, visually and musically. Under the emotionally charged and beautifully paced direction of internationally acclaimed Crystal Manich, a harmonically compelling ensemble of singers casts its spell over us for an evening truly mesmerizing and magical.
Based on the writings of the Colombian Nobel Prize-winning author, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, the libretto by Marcela Fuentes-Berain invites us onto an Amazonian riverboat in the early 1900s as the world-renown opera diva, Florencia Grimaldi, returns after years of absence to her native Brazil to sing in the celebrated opera house, Manaus. Grimaldi is also hoping to reunite with the lover she left behind in order to pursue her career, a butterfly hunter who has disappeared into the dark and foreboding jungle.
Traveling with an incognito Florencia Grimaldi is a journalist, Rosalba, who has spent two years researching the famed but reclusive singer. The writer hopes finally to meet the celebrity who has refused all interviews in the past. Also traveling to hear the singer’s highly anticipated performance are a bickering couple, Paula and Alvaro – much disenchanted with their life together – and a restless, discontented young man, Arcadio, who dreams of being a pilot in the air and not on the water as his persuasive uncle, the boat’s captain, plans for him.
As they board the El Dorado, Ricardo José Rivera charms us with a vibrantly rich baritone as his Riolobo introduces each of the boat’s travelers. With both strikingly round and pulsating notes that draw our attention to his every word, Riolobo describes Florencia as “a mysterious woman like the Amazon of this river,” Rosalba as “a writer who desires what she already has,” Arcadio as one who “wishes he were somewhere else,” and the couple Paula and Alvaro as “about to be consumed once more” in their ongoing and increasing testy tension. Throughout the journey, Rivera’s Riolobo embodies an ever-changing persona that navigates between the worlds of reality and fantasy, always with vocals that engage and energize with deeply resounding timbre.
With elegant agility, Elizabeth Caballero intones a soprano voice that so easily hangs aloft in high sustained notes as her Florencia Grimaldi questions with palpable regret her decision twenty years prior to leave behind her lover, Cristóbal. After all, it was from him that “the passion of my voice was born.” The deeper into the jungle the boat travels, the more she begins to wonder in a glorious voice that cries out in searches for answers, “Am I alive?” Can he be alive?” before finally declaring, “As long as I am alive, I will continue searching for you.”
The search for love is the farthest thing – at least as the journey begins – for either Rosalba or Arcadio. Rosalba is focused on her quest for an interview with Florencia; and Arcadio, on his search for an escape from the boredom of river piloting. The two continually find themselves together but do all they can to ignore any electricity between them, with Rosalba declaring upfront, “I believe love was invented by the idle.”
In one of the night’s best directed and enacted scenes, the exhilaratingly clear soprano vocals of Alêxa Anderson’s Rosalba do all they can to convince herself and Arcadio that “love is a tomb,” as the accomplished tenor notes of César Delgado chime in with Arcadio’s ever-weakening agreements to her claims of love’s faults. The more their voices sing in an intertwined duet to deny love, the more their arms interlink and the more their singing lips close their distance between them, yet not quite close enough for the ultimate kiss that will come in a later duo of splendidly climatic declarations of “You will give meaning to my writing” and “You will guide my flying.”
When Paula (Guadalupe Paz) sings to Alvaro (Efrain Solis) in her inquiring, entrancing mezzo soprano, “Do you remember our first day together?”, his firmly noted, husky baritone retorts, “No, I’ve forgotten already.” Their onboard battles of wills that result often in eruptions rivaling the Amazon’s own storms are often matched by an orchestra’s echoes of warring brass and jungle-like drums. However, Paula’s view of “love as a prison” is later successfully countered with Florencia’s “love’s as immense as an ocean,” in another of the night’s highlights as their musically and emotionally thrilling duet provides Paula the insight and permission that she needs to rediscover a love for Alvaro she thought was gone forever.
The power of a river’s journey to teach a life lesson is not lost on the boat’s Captain (Vartan Gabrielian) whose commanding tones of bass can also soften to match the sway of tropical breezes. To his nephew, Arcadio, who at times seems suffocated by both the plights of his past and his present, he sings, “Things always move forward as you cannot go back in life.” For each of the Captain’s passengers, these simple words symbolize a lesson that the ever-flowing river will teach them about what is most important in life: Move beyond past assumptions and biases to open oneself to new possibilities. Their individual journeys to new understandings are greatly sped forward when they are faced with first a devastating storm and then a plague that threaten not only their journey on the river but their very lives.
Both the majestic beauty and the scary possibilities of the Amazon are captured in the scenic designs of Lilana Duque-Piñeiro and the lighting/shadows created by Tláloc Löpez-Watermann. Ulises Alcala’s costumes combine the elegance of early twentieth-century, societal travelers; the tropical manners of a riverboat’s crew; the colorful kaleidoscope of Amazonian natives and tourists; and the enchantment of fantastical appearances in the midst of the mysterious jungle.
Some of my personally favorite parts of Opera San José’s production are the scene transitions when the large orchestra’s brilliance has numerous chances under Joséph Marcheso’s conducting to bring to life the sounds and ambiance of the Amazon. Tropical birds, swarming insects, the large leaves in the wind, a raging storm, a morning’s healing sunrise – these and more are exquisitely heard in Daniel Catán’s cinematic score. Woodwinds, brass, strings, and percussion all have many chances to shine forth in painting vivid scenes we can almost see through the music alone.
The one, recurring downside of the evening is that there are times when the orchestra overpowers some of the principals, with words lost except through the reading of the superscripts. This seemed to happen on opening night more in the first act than the second.
The final, triumphant moments of Opera San José’s Florencia en el Amazonas are the breath-taking, dreamlike capstone to an evening of opera where reality and fantasy join as partners to produce a night not to be missed by either the opera aficionado or the opera virgin.
Rating: 4.5 E
A Theatre Eddys Best Bet Production
Florencia en el Amazonas continues 2 p.m. Sunday, April 28; 7:30, Friday, May 3; and 2 p.m. Sunday, May 5, 2024, in a two-hour, fifteen-minute production (including intermission) by San José Opera at the California Theatre, , 345 1st Street, San Jose, CA. Tickets are available online at www.operasj.org; by visiting or calling the box office Monday – Friday 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. at 2149 Paragon Drive, 408-437-4450; or by emailing boxoffice@operasj.org.
Photo Credits: David Allen
