Elegant evening

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.