Juan Diego Flórez
Barbican
It was an ideal way to spend the evening after Polling Day: a relaxed recital, undemanding and not too long, by one of the most individual of present-day singers. At the same time there was an element of risk: Juan Diego Flórez, the young Peruvian who created a stir singing the comparatively small role of Rodrigo in Rossini’s Otello at Covent Garden, and has since achieved enormous popularity there in bel canto roles, performed a series of songs and arias from the 18th and 19th centuries, with only one solo from his accompanist Vincenzo Scalera. The risk was in exposing the limitations of his voice and of his stage personality.
He is, of course, instantly recognisable, thanks to the head voice that always indicates that Flórez can aim for vertiginously high notes, though in fact we got hardly any of those at the Barbican, at any rate by the time I had to leave, after the first encore. He is famous, too, for his coloratura, which again was in short supply. In fact, it seemed that he was determined to show that his range is wider than those who have seen him only in bel canto roles might think: he began with an aria by Cimarosa, continued with a couple of Rossini’s Sins of my old age — I could have done with some less venial sins than the ones Flórez chose, which verged on the insipid: Rossini indulged his taste for the splenetic and malicious elsewhere in those pieces, and I’d like to hear whether Flórez can encompass those. An aria from Rossini’s Otello I found hard to take seriously, since its cabaletta is based on the ‘Cat Duet’, made famous by Schwarzkopf and Victoria de los Angeles.
After the interval Flórez ranged widely, ending with a charming piece from Boieldieu’s La Dame blanche, preceded by some zarzuela and, in a quite different vein from the rest, Werther’s ‘Pourquoi me réveiller?’ from Massenet’s opera.
Flórez’s presence on stage is pleasing, he seems at ease, moves around a fair bit, makes conventional but appropriate gestures. He took no time at all to warm up, and I was also surprised by the size of his voice: in the opera house it has always struck me as focused but small, in the Barbican it often rang out, with no sense of strain. He was awarded with fervent applause for everything he did, which was positively wild by the end. But what elicits it is his sheerly vocal prowess: one gets the impression that what his devotees would most enjoy would be an evening of top Cs alternating with the most florid passages Rossini ever devised, and to heel with the mid-range legato and expression. His most riotous success has been in La fille du régiment, which shortly returns to the Royal Opera repertoire.
The great singer from the past whose voice Flórez’s most resembles is Fernando De Lucia, an immensely prolific recording artist from the first 20 years of the last century, often referred to as ‘the last rococo tenor’. He sang not only bel canto but also Verdi, Puccini, the veristi, and with fervent intensity, though with strange intrusions (a decoration in ‘Che gelida manina’). If you listen to a few tracks of him, then compare Flórez, you recognise that they belong to the same style of singing, which, if you had to use only one word, you’d need to call elegant. Yet it is part of the excitement of listening to De Lucia that he can encompass not only the elaborate demands of Rossini and his contemporaries, but just as much the overwrought passions of Verdi’s and Puccini’s heroes, thereby giving a different perspective on them. And that is in large measure thanks to the disciplined ebullience of his personality: it’s a matter of temperament, even of character.
If you then go to Flórez, it seems that you are getting style and no special substance. It is hard to say, and would be impertinent to speculate, whether that is because Flórez doesn’t have a lot of temperament or personality, or whether it is that he hasn’t yet found a way of uniting his mode of singing and what he is capable of feeling. In this recital, apart from the Massenet, there was little to be expressed; but it was telling how unmoving ‘Pourquoi me réveiller?’ was. Of course, out of context and with no orchestra, it is difficult to make the required impression, but there have been singers who could do it. Listening to the new Decca recording of Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice I wonder if Flórez will ever be one of them. His Orphée is a poised vocalist, very far from Gluck’s instruction that he should sound as if his leg were being sawn off.
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