\n<\/p>\n
Yannick N\u00e9zet-S\u00e9guin, the Metropolitan Opera\u2019s music director, had stepped onto the podium on Thursday evening to begin the performance. The theater was hushed before his downbeat when a voice rang out from a balcony.<\/p>\n
\u201cViva la \u00f3pera en espa\u00f1ol!\u201d someone shouted, and the audience erupted in applause.<\/p>\n
This is what is most notable about the company premiere of Daniel Cat\u00e1n\u2019s heavily perfumed \u201cFlorencia en el Amazonas,\u201d starring Ailyn P\u00e9rez: It brings a language spoken at home by about a quarter<\/a> of New York City back to the Met.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Just the third work in Spanish to be presented by the company, \u201cFlorencia\u201d<\/a> is the first in nearly a century, the first full-length and the first to have been written by a composer from Latin America. Born in Mexico in 1949, Cat\u00e1n studied with the serialist master Milton Babbitt, then proceeded to write lush, tonal music that couldn\u2019t be more different from his teacher\u2019s.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Before his death in 2011<\/a>, Cat\u00e1n specialized in appealingly colorful, politely dull works that harkened back to a much earlier era \u2014 one that ended with the posthumous premiere of the final work by his operas\u2019 guiding spirit, Giacomo Puccini, in 1926.<\/p>\n That happens to be the year the Met last put on a Spanish-language opera, and there\u2019s something amusing in the fact that next to nothing in \u201cFlorencia,\u201d which premiered in Houston<\/a> in 1996, would have surprised an audience back then. You almost want to applaud the impressive, if perverse, achievement of a score that so thoroughly rejects all the galvanic musical developments since the early 1900s, when the opera is set.<\/p>\n The action \u2014 hardly complex, but crowded \u2014 takes place aboard a steamboat in the Amazon rainforest. The passengers are on their way to hear the great diva Florencia Grimaldi sing at the Belle \u00c9poque opera house in Manaus, Brazil.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a swooning pair of young lovers, and a bickering married couple; a would-be Grimaldi biographer and a mystical narrator; oh, and Florencia, too, somehow unrecognized by everyone else and returning to Manaus in search of her lover, a butterfly hunter she lost long ago.<\/p>\n Marcela Fuentes-Berain, the work\u2019s librettist, was a student of Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, and while the opera is not based directly on any of his books, its debt to his dreamlike magical realism \u2014 a style that has dominated outside perspectives on Latin American culture to the point of clich\u00e9 \u2014 is clear.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The characters emote with the rich, sticky languor of a lava lamp, and none come to life with the force of those in the works to which Cat\u00e1n nods. This is an opera that is, first and foremost, a tribute to opera. If your main character is a famous singer, Puccini\u2019s \u201cTosca\u201d is an inescapable comparison, and Florencia\u2019s last name is the same as the lead soprano role\u2019s in Verdi\u2019s \u201cSimon Boccanegra.\u201d<\/p>\n A recurring, darkly watery tremor motif is borrowed from the music of the phantoms in Puccini\u2019s \u201cTurandot\u201d; in a brief orchestral interlude, a delicate chord that builds from the bottom to the top of the strings is snipped from the opening of Act III of his \u201cLa Boh\u00e8me.\u201d<\/p>\n Played with smooth polish at the Met under N\u00e9zet-S\u00e9guin, Cat\u00e1n\u2019s score endlessly undulates and glitters, in case we\u2019ve forgotten that we\u2019re on a river. Mellow combinations of winds blend with sumptuous strings, accented discreetly with brasses for an overall glow. Both composer and conductor are sensitive to singers, not smothering their vocal lines but supporting them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Those lines are effusively lyrical enough to make \u201cDead Man Walking,\u201d<\/a> the extremely accessible 2000 opera that opened the Met\u2019s season, seem like nails on a chalkboard by comparison. It\u2019s not that there\u2019s anything inherently wrong with nostalgia. But \u201cFlorencia\u201d feels encased in amber, a dead tradition walking.<\/p>\n The piece exudes homogeneous, interchangeable, anesthetized prettiness; you get the sense that any character\u2019s music could have just as easily been transferred to anyone else. While it\u2019s not an unpleasant way to spend a couple of hours, there is nothing approaching vivid characterization or compelling drama \u2014 the things that mattered to Puccini, that his supreme lyrical gift was serving.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n What \u201cFlorencia\u201d does have on its side is brevity, hardly the virtue of most of the new and recent operas that have come to the Met. \u201cDead Man Walking\u201d sags under two and a half hours of music \u2014 the same as \u201cGrounded,\u201d<\/a> which will open the company\u2019s season next year. Forty-five minutes shorter, \u201cFlorencia\u201d is even more slender than its Puccinian models.<\/p>\n Mary Zimmerman\u2019s pared-down yet busy, inelegant production suggests locations on board the ship with a few movable pieces, like railings and deck chairs. Riccardo Hern\u00e1ndez\u2019s set surrounds the playing space with curving walls flooded with verdant projections to give a sense of the walls of forest flanking the river.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Puppets and sprightly dancers frolicking in fish and bird headdresses \u2014 Ana Kuzmani\u0107 designed the \u201cLion King\u201d-esque costumes \u2014 cutely try to convey the region\u2019s exotic explosion of fauna. T.J. Gerckens\u2019s lighting evokes radiant dawns, dusks and nocturnes.<\/p>\n But Zimmerman is at a loss conjuring mystery. The violent storm at the end of the first act is dominated, oddly, by a gentle fall of red confetti. And while the baritone Mattia Olivieri, in his Met debut, sings Riolobo, the narrator, with firm, juicy tone, the staging struggles to capture his status on the blurry boundary between real and magic. The rest of the supporting cast also performs with energy, but P\u00e9rez is, appropriately, the uncontested star: wistful, tender and sincere, her voice not enormous but generously delivered, her high notes glistening.<\/p>\n She manages to be both soaring and movingly reserved in Florencia\u2019s closing aria, and the final moments bring a delightful costuming coup, stylishly lit. The score ends not with \u201cTosca\u201d-style fortississimo, but in muted, modest quiet \u2014 a genuinely sweet touch on an often saccharine evening.<\/p>\n Florencia en el Amazonas<\/strong><\/p>\n Through Dec. 14 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n