Samson et Dalila, Grange Park Opera, review: 'sumptuous, imaginative'

Patrick Mason's new production of the Biblical bodice-ripper could easily have slipped into parody. But it works, says Rupert Christiansen

The cast of Grange Park Opera's Samson et Dalila
The cast of Grange Park Opera's Samson et Dalila Credit: Photo: © Robert Workman

Opera directors generally get a bad press nowadays, but they should have our sympathy when faced with ancient historical epics such as Nabucco, Aida or Thaïs. Finding an idiom in which to stage them convincingly is problematic: keep them “in period” and they end up looking like The Life of Brian; update them and they lose the sense of primitive grandeur that is their raison d’être.

So I don’t want to come down hard on Patrick Mason, who has undertaken Saint-Saens’ Samson et Dalila, the mother of all Biblical kitsch and a bodice-ripper to boot. Tactfully avoiding any hint of tea-towel headgear, he has plumped instead for a rather crude analogy of the Philistine persecution of the Hebrews in Gaza with the Pétainiste regime’s attitude to the Jews in Vichy France. It works.

Although he never quite makes it clear what Samson’s calling-card is or what relation these resistance fighters have to their oppressors, Mason at least provides the action with a broadly plausible and immediately understandable anti-Semitic context, greatly helped by an imaginative set by Francis O’Connor which duly collapses in a spectacular final dégringolade.

Things aren’t easy for the singers either. The Wagnerian vocal demands of the title-roles require rare birds – a heroic tenor of the Vickers or Domingo mould, a mezzo-soprano who can be both thrillingly fearsome and wantonly seductive.

Such performers are in exceptionally scant supply (Samson is not yet in Jonas Kaufmann’s repertory, and nobody since Olga Borodina has mastered Dalila), but Grange Park has made a canny choice in casting Carl Tanner and Sara Fulgoni, experienced performers who can sing all the notes and keep their dignity throughout.

Although neither is a subtle actor and their French diction is pure mush, they both have the heft to rise to decent accounts of their big numbers: Samson’s noble "eyeless in Gaza” monologue, Dalila’s hymns to love, and above all their gripping dialogue in Act 2. It could have been a lot worse.

(Photo: Robert Workman)

The third major player in this opera is the chorus, here not ideally blended but rousing in the guise of both fervent Jews and decadent Philistines. The singers of the secondary roles make little impression, but not ruinously so.

What lifts the quality of the evening decisively is the playing of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under the energetic Gianluca Marciano. Almost deafeningly tumultuous in the first act, they prove sensitive in the second to the delicately perfumed orchestration and have a ball with the flamboyant Bacchanale (devoid of naked flesh in this staging) in the third. I haven’t heard this opera for years: it was good to be so forcibly reminded of the score’s sumptuous magnificence.

Until 16 July. Box office 01962 737373; grangeparkopera.co.uk