Colin Davis, who was 75 last September, seems bent on re-examining composers and works that have been central to his career. Next year he returns to Mozart and Berlioz. At the moment, though, he is turning his hand to Camille Saint-Saëns's Samson and Delilah, which he first conducted at Covent Garden in 1981.
Those performances turned an entire generation on to a work hitherto dogged by its reputation for otiose religiosity and prurience. Davis stripped away the stuffiness to expose layers of genuine fervour and deep eroticism in a score that stands comparison to Wagner's depiction of the contrarieties of flesh and spirit in Tannhäuser. Twenty years on, the mix remains potent.
If anything, Davis has widened the opera's extremes. The austere and the obscene are now garishly juxtaposed. In the central act, the Wagnerian influence is omnipresent, as whole-tone scales and gurgling woodwind cast a pall of erotic tension. Elsewhere, however, Saint-Saëns's primary debt is to Bach, as the vast choral panoplies of the persecuted Hebrews, outstandingly delivered by the London Symphony Orchestra Chorus, unwind and overlap with intense, fugal precision. The LSO's playing, similarly, is to die for.
Davis has, however, seemingly had second thoughts about his casting. In 1981, his Samson was Jon Vickers, a religious man off stage and a deeply spiritual singer on it. Now the role is taken by the most carnal of tenors, Jose Cura, who plays Samson as a feral creature, barely in control of his emotions. Unfortunately, Cura has gone into decline of late and now seems incapable of doing anything other than blast or croon. He raucously rouses the Hebrews to rebellion with a vibrato so wide as to drag him off pitch, then responds to Delilah with silky whispers that seem mannered after a while.
Davis's new Delilah is the Russian mezzo Marina Domashenko, an androgynous, crop-haired Uma Thurman lookalike with a weird, deeply sexual voice that seems to transcend gender. Her characterisation is telling too, as she peels back the seductive facade to reveal the lethal combination of cold calculation and sadism that drives this woman on. In short, Cura apart, this is sensational. If you heard Davis conduct it in 1981, it offers more than just pleasant reminiscence. If you didn't, you have a real treat in store.
· Repeat performance tomorrow. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
