A voyage up the Amazon charms at the Met

In the last couple of weeks, if you were not swatting mozzies up the jungle with Florencia en el Amazonas, New York’s Met had you tooth grinding with The Life and Times of Malcolm X,who famously opined in 1964 all white men were “devils”, and that the demise of the White race was imminent. Clearly a visionary worthy of celebration.

Following hard on the heels of this season’s opening cheer-me-up, Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, (there is a clue in the title), these two puzzling second-tier, and frankly old hat, repertoire choices for a company of the Met’s global standing, made even the onset of rich pumpkin pie this Thanksgiving holiday a blessed relief. 

Florencia is a combo of Carry on Up the Amazon – should Kenneth Williams and the rest of the bonkers Carry-On comics have ever such a stonking title – and the 1978 Peter Ustinov version of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile. 

A review of The Life and Times of Malcolm X can wait for another, more pungent, day. For now, we will stick to the opera singer Florencia Grimaldi and the motley crew of the steamboat, El Dorado, cruising towards Manaus.

Act I

Florencia Grimaldi is a legendary soprano rebooting her career at the reopening of the famous Manaus opera house in the depths of the Amazon rainforest. Travelling incognito. 

A mystical character, Riolobo – probably simply pissed – introduces the passengers on the El Dorado manifest. Paulo and Alvaro, are a couple shouldering Charles and Diana-esque marital woes.  

Rosalba, a journalist, is secretly writing a biography of Florencia. Arcadio, the reluctant second in command and nephew of the Captain (no name) has the hots for Rosalba. And Cristobal – the never seen lover of Florencia, who inspires her singing, but disappeared in the jungle while hunting butterflies. Maybe her voice was too much for him. 

Rosalba and Arcadio and Paula and Alvaro (the latter giving a great impression of the famous Bickersons, America’s 1940’s warring radio show favourites) play cards. A storm brews up. Alvaro is swept overboard. The Captain cops it – unconscious – and Arcadio, despite desperate wheel wrestling, can’t stop running aground.

Act II

The ship having run aground, so did the plot. Nothing really happens. Florencia can’t decide if she’s alive or dead. Rosalba and Arcadio renounce any potential love, while clearly having the hots, hotter when aground than afloat. Paradoxical Paula now mourns the loss of her sparring partner, Alvaro.

Riolobo, the useful drunk, mysteriously returns Alvaro to the ship, claiming Paula’s regret has restored him. It’s the sort of sentimental dialogue heard in a Glasgow pub on any Friday night. “Naw, pal, youse have got it aw wrang. She really, really, (hick), loves you. G’wan back home and see if I’m no stupit.”

Meantime Rosalba, who had lost her notebook with all her notes concerning Florencia, realises she is actually in conversation with her heroine. Great journo opportunity after all. She milks it.

El Dorado reaches Manaus, whose pink opera house has magically self-elevated from behind the green jungle. Gratuitously, there is an outbreak of cholera. And the tickets for Manaus Opera House have a strict “no refund” policy. Very Covid-19.

Florencia, lamenting the loss of Cristobal morphs into a butterfly and flits off to the jungle to find him. I had crudely assumed the soprano had died of cholera because she was determined to perform in “her” opera house, whatever it took and had headed towards the cholera-infected stage. This was her liberated spirit butterflying off to seek her lost soulmate. But, no, it was meant to be a mystical transformation. No infection to see here! Riolobo said so. How can I contradict the drunk? 

Operas often have their endings re-written. Composer Christopher Tin is currently rewriting the end of Turandot. So, should I email librettist, Marcela Fuentes-Berain at once with my revised plot? Well, no. What’s the point of fiddling with a work as trivial as this? Now, Puccini’s unfinished Turandot. That’s in another league.

Michael Cataná – 1949 – 2011 – was a Mexican composer known for his lush, filmic music. Opera Magazine opined: “A distinctive lushness that seemed of a piece with the twentieth century’s great movie music yet remained unquestionably operatic in scope.” Damning with faint praise? Perhaps. 

For me, the music lacked fire. Eric Korngold composed for Hollywood and the opera stage, but his score for Die tote Stadt, also a mystical fancy set in Bruges, could be searing when it needed to be. In Florencia we never transcend the lushness of the green Amazon jungle. There are no sharp edges.

At the work’s premiere – Houston Grand Opera, 1996 – New York Times critic, Anthony Tommasini, bemoaned the missed opportunity of introducing folkloric or indigenous music. His dislike of the production, then set with the characters locked on a revolving ship that “could be anywhere” was profound. No doubt at the Met. We were on the Amazon. That, at least, was corrected.

The production by Mary Zimmerman, set design Riccardo Hernández (Met debut) was visually stunning. Not sure about projecting the subtitles on the backdrop mountain greenery, though. 

Hernández had set himself a clear objective: “Another thing that’s present in the production is the flora and fauna of the Amazon, which is all exaggerated. There are exaggerated takes on water lilies, and there’s a heron and a hummingbird and butterflies. We have dancers and actors as those creatures, but we also have some puppet evocations as well. 

We were so struck by the fact that the dolphins in the Amazon are pink, although they aren’t a particularly pleasing pink. But we heighten everything in terms of color.”

My favourite was a crocodile divided into several parts with the spaces between coloured blue like the river, so it appeared convincingly, criss-crossing the stage, semi-submerged. I thought it had done for Alvaro when he left the storm-tossed ship.

Ailyn Peréz, American soprano, who sang Florencia and who is taking on the role of Carmen later in the season, set the emotional passages of the score alight. Her final aria, before she sprouts her butterfly wings, mingles music and love and comes to glorious fruition in her transformation, Escúchame (Hear me). 

Florencia calls out to Cristóbal in the emotional set piece that concludes the opera. She is performing for Cristóbal, singing her heart out, and “there is a metamorphosis of the singer through the transformational power of her own art.” So went the blurb, which was almost true. 

Pleasant enough. But why is it being staged at the Met? The official blurb banged on about the importance of the company’s first staging of a Latin American opera. I think I would have kept quiet about that. After all, Houston staged it twenty-seven years ago. I smell desperate virtue signalling. 

There used to be many reasons why worthy, enjoyable, lushly scored operas didn’t usually make it to the Met stage. Florencia en el Amazonas embodied most of them. Top of my list? Slightness. European houses buzz with exciting new works. What is the Met up to? 

Another surprising Met debut!

Last week English National Opera (ENO) was on manoeuvres in Manhattan. Their American Friends held a reception at the British Consul’s residence on Park Avenue. Top brass was shining, but Artistic Director Annilese Miskimmon was absent, on maternity leave. A touch of Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Terésias, an opera based on the theme, “everyone must make babies”?

Dr Harry Brunjes, ENO Chairman, was flying the flag for the opera company that only a year ago was cut off at the knees. Funding cut to zero and tickets issued for an HS2 trip to Manchester. Oops! That’s not happening anytime soon.

A feisty campaign secured ENO’s immediate survival, but Brunjes is clear that the company’s campaign to ensure a long-term future is ongoing.

The following evening, Harry and his wife Jacquie were guests at the Metropolitan Opera Club’s Lincoln Center dining room. (Full disclosure. I’m on the board). After a discussion about ENO, Harry and Jacquie performed the Folkington Manor Song Cycle. Folkington is their beautiful home at the foot of the South Downs in East Sussex.

The couple are redoubtable troupers. They met onstage when Harry was a medical student and Jacquie Storey was a singer and dancer. Harry played the piano, Jacquie sang. Then we had a duet. The songs evoked life in London. Some of the modified lyrics poked gentle fun at Reaction’s opera critic. Here we all are.

Not many Chairmen of national opera companies can perform as well as steer their charges away from the financial rocks. As Harry quipped afterwards: “We’ve had our Met debut.” They are now Honorary Members of the Club!