Friday, January 31 & February 2, 2025
Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts
Raleigh, North Carolina – USA
Daniel CATÁN: Florenzia en el Amazonas
Joseph Mechavich, conductor; John Hoomes, stage director; Daniel Catán, composer; Marcela Fuentes-Berain, librettist. Cast: Elaine Alvarez (Florencia), Marlen Nahhas (Rosalba), Jason Karn (Arcadio), Kate Farrar (Paula), Levi Hernandez (Alvaro), Richard Ollarsaba (Riolobo), Ricardo Lugo (Captain).
Christopher Hill | 1 FEB 2025
This weekend, the North Carolina Opera is staging Florencia en el Amazonas by Daniel Catán. Prior to the present production in Raleigh, Florencia has been mounted or remounted at least sixteen times in the United States during the current century. Mr. Catán must have known he had a hit on his hands by 2003, for it was then that he fashioned an orchestral suite from its music. The pace of productions has only increased since, including recent mountings by the Lyric Opera of Chicago (November 2021) and by New York’s Metropolitan Opera (November 2023). Your reviewer attended the Met production.
The current Raleigh staging and production have been borrowed, along with stage director John Hoomes, not from the Met but from Nashville, Tennessee—and for good reason: the Met production was interesting but didn’t have the impact of this one, not only in terms of what the eye sees but also in terms of what the mind conceives: the Nashville/Raleigh staging brings out the best in the libretto (about which more is said below).
Florencia en el Amazonas is the North Carolina Opera’s first work by a Mexican composer. Daniel Catán (full family name: Catán Porteny) was a boomer (1949–2011) who, in his youth, took a doctorate at Columbia University, studying with Milton Babbitt, Benjamin Boretz, and other exponents of analytical, notation-driven, computer-rendered, and technology-dependent music. Mr. Catán himself, with Columbia behind him, tended, however, in a different musical direction: towards corporeal, timbrally colorful, emotionally-rendered music of the kind exemplified by such early 20th-century composers as Strauss, Respighi, and Korngold. Add to this mix the soaring lyricism of Puccini, throw in a pinch of Wagner and Scriabin and occasional patches of minimalist instrumentation, and voilà: you have the makings of the musical fabric underlying his opera Florencia en el Amazonas (“Florencia in the Amazon”).
Mr. Catán first tried his hand at opera in 1979 with Meeting at Dusk. Ten years passed before his second opera, Rappaccini’s Daughter, was so well received that the San Diego Opera took it up in 1994. The success of that production, in turn, led the Houston Grand Opera, Los Angeles Opera, and Seattle Opera companies to commission Florencia, which premiered in Houston in October 1996.
A good deal of the work’s charm lies in its libretto. At a pre-performance talk Eric Mitchko explained that originally the hope was to adapt Garcia Márquez’s novel Love in a Time of Cholera for opera. Mr. Garcia was sympathetic but preferred to allow characters taken from his writing (along with cholera itself) to be used within a new and purposively operatic scenario to be written by one of his students, Marcela Fuentes-Berain. Ms. Fuentes rose to the occasion. She braids the quests of several typical operatic characters into the Amazon’s far reaches, where magical realism can weave its spells unhindered by the relentless calculations of urban commerce.
This mise en scène evokes a strong and sensuous reaction from the composer. Says Mr. Catán: “Nothing is more overwhelming than daybreak in the jungle—the calls of birds and insects slowly weaving the most fantastic tapestry of sound, the resplendent freshness of the greenery, the astonishing shapes and colors of some flowers, the size of the sun. These elements acted so powerfully in my imagination…” And regarding the Amazon specifically: “I thought of the marimba, its luscious wooden sounds and the way they would combine with flutes, clarinets and harp. The sonorities of these instruments seemed to me to capture the sound of the river, the way it changes its timbre as it flows, transforming everything in its path.”

The Cast of ‘Florencia en el Amazonas,’ l-r: Elaine Alvarez, Marlen Nahhas, Richard Ollarsaba, Jason Karn, Ricardo Lugo, Levi Hernandez, and Kate Farrar. (credit: Eric Waters)
Most of the action transpires on a passenger boat, the El Dorado, which functions as a kind of Grand Hotel for its disparate travelers. Aboard are the eponymous lead, Florencia Grimaldi, an established and reclusive operatic soprano returning to the Amazon in search of her past; Rosalba, a journalist, and Arcadio, nephew of the boat’s Capitán, who fall in love during the voyage; Paula and Álvaro, a middle-aged couple hoping the adventure will repair their failing marriage; and the Capitán plus his magical first mate, Riolobo.
In Raleigh, Florencia was sung by soprano Elaine Alvarez, a spinto of Cuban origin already appreciated in the U.S. for her Verdi and Puccini heroines. Ms. Alvarez has real stage presence, and her voice is impressive, easily carrying over a full orchestra without strain or tonal degradation—and this not only in her upper tessitura but evenly in all registers. Ms. Alvarez also has the ability to sing with notable nuance, emotion, and rhetorical restraint across all her registers. Your reviewer expects great things for her and thinks it no surprise that she is singing leading roles at the Met this season.
Rosalba, the opera’s second soprano character, was sung by Marlen Nahhas. Ms. Nahhas has an attractive and instantly recognizable voice, plus the musical ability to sculpt her lines, bringing a particular beauty to their unfolding. In her big second-act scene with Ms. Alvarez, Ms. Nahhas initially seemed to restrain her voice, as if playing second fiddle, but then, perhaps inspired by Ms. Alvarez’s gorgeous singing, decided to match it, with the result that the two divas kept rising to greater and greater vocal and interpretive heights. It was, without exaggeration, a stunning theatrical moment. If Ms. Nahhas does not yet have quite the stage presence of Ms. Alvarez, or quite her evenness of registers, she nonetheless possesses a most pleasing and personal vocal timbre as well as a striking combination of tonal beauty and musical intelligence. One hopes her rising star rises ever higher.
Having to follow two sopranos like Mss. Alvarez and Nahhas must be a challenge, but mezzo-soprano Kate Farrar was equal to the task. Particularly in her second-act aria, she brought to the character Paula a pleasing combination of dramatic skill and vocal panache.

l-r: Marlen Nahhas, Levi Hernandez, Kate Farrar, and Jason Karn. (credit: Eric Waters)
Bass-baritone Richard Ollarsaba played the magical character Riolobo. Mr. Ollarsaba is young, slender, relatively tall, and gifted with an exceptional, relaxed voice and acting chops that enable him to sing as a character, not as a type. He, too, possesses the kind of projection that can be heard, unstrained, above a full orchestra. He deserves a big career.
Levi Hernandez sang the baritone part of Alvaro with dramatic conviction and ringing high notes.
One character in the libretto was designed to be as constant and unchanging as a ship’s tiller, and that was the Capitán of the El Dorado, played by Puerto Rican bass Ricardo Lugo. Mr. Lugo brings oodles of character to his Capitán, and he has the seasoned craft to make this substantial role into one of the production’s chief assets.
Jason Karn is a handsome tenor who can score big in his upper tessitura but who, on this night at least, disappears into the instrumentation below that range. He always looked like an appealing love match for Ms. Nahhas but did not always sound like one. One suspects that he thrives in works with more modest orchestral textures—in Verdi, say.

l-r: Richard Ollarsaba and Ricardo Lugo (credit: Eric Waters)
It would be remiss of me not to mention the major role played by the chorus in this production. Collectively, they create, throughout much of the action, an animistic analog to the Amazon. It sounds far-fetched, but it works splendidly, though I dare say it must be exhausting. Surely, this is one of the hardest-working choruses in operatic history.
Despite the tentativeness of a few solos, the pit orchestra of the North Carolina Opera produced a steady flow of well-rendered, opulent, and complex sounds. Credit goes not only to Mr. Catán’s skill in instrumentation and to the players themselves but also, surely, to this production’s orchestral maestro, Joseph Mechavich. Mr. Mechavich was the principal conductor of the Kentucky Opera for sixteen years. In Atlanta he was last heard in 2019 leading Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking. In 2025, he will conduct operatic productions in virtually all regions of the United States. He will return to Raleigh this April (2025) in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro.
A pre-concert talk at 6:30 was led by NC Opera’s General Director, Eric Mitchko. It was well attended and will be repeated on Sunday prior to the matinee performance of Florencia at 2:00 p.m. ■

Elaine Alvarez as Florencia, transforms into a butterfly. (recit: Eric Waters)_800x533
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- North Carolina Opera: ncopera.org
- Joseph Mechavich: fletcherartists.com/joseph-mechavich
- Elaine Alvarez: elainealvarez.com
- Marlen Nahhas: marlennahhas.com
- Kate Farrar: operasaratoga.org/kate-farrar
- Jason Karn: jasonkarn.com
- Levi Hernandez: uiatalent.com/artists3/levi-hernandez
- Richard Ollarsaba: richardollarsaba.com
- Ricardo Lugo: uiatalent.com/artists3/ricardo-lugo

Read more by Christopher Hill.