“Opera as Opera” news: two more thorough and supportive reviews are in. One is by Nils-Goeran Olve in the March issue of the dear old The Record Collector, and the other by Paul–André Demierre in Crescendo Magazine (www.crescendo-magazine.be). It will be a few days before we get some pull quotes on the “Opera as Opera” page, and Mr. Demierre’s piece is in French. But in the meantime we’ll rest the case with his concluding line: ‘”Opera as Opera’: une bible!”

Is Camille Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila a great opera? Bearing in mind that though any opera exists only in performance, and so the answer always depends on tonight’s realities, we still learn through experience of any given work that it does or does not have the possibility of being great tonight, and on that basis name it “great” or not. And in that sense most of us would say that if our standard of greatness is Otello or Tristan und Isolde or Don Giovanni, Samson falls short; it’s not a great opera. But it is a good one, which if well performed can be exciting, entertaining, even moving. That makes it a legitimate canonical repertory piece, and if our gauge isn’t the best of Verdi or Wagner or Mozart, but whichever we deem the best of the new operas the Met has brought us over the past half-century, Samson miraculously ascends to greatness. We’d have to go back to Peter Grimes to sensibly argue the relative merits. That’s why the canon is a canon, the repertory a repertory.

One of the things I love about Samson is its orchestral palette. Even those who condescend to Saint-Saëns have to concede his almost Rimsky-esque expertise as colorist. I suppose he can sometimes be accused of splashing color around to conceal an absence of musical substance, but in his best big work, like the Third Symphony and Samson, where the structures are firm and the melodic or thematic ideas consistently engaging, that isn’t at all the case, and from Samson’s brassy call to arms to the undulating breezes of the Valley of Sorek, the cracking of the storm, the groan of the mill wheel and the fizzy, tinselly tints of the Temple of Dagon, the theatrical descriptiveness of the score is consistently captivating.

Not on the night, however, specifically the night of March 13, and that’s where my complaints begin. (Yes, the production is new this season. Musical and vocal things first, however.) The conductor was Sir Mark Elder, about whom I’ve blown warm and cool, never hot or cold, over the years. My reservations about him have often centered around tempo, at times not merely slow, but lumbering. On this occasion, these seemed to me perfectly all right, or would have been if possessed of more inner animation and outer presence. But those were lacking (in basic sonic terms, the music was underplayed), and the color range never got beyond Easter Egg pastels. Then there’s this: though there is plenty in the way of upper-midrange interplay for the woodwinds, sorties for trumpet, plinks for xylophone, plonks and sweeps for the harp, and taps for the cymbal, much of Samson is built from the bottom. This is especially true in Act 1, which is with some reason considered the easiest to let die, and is as true of the extensive choral writing as of the orchestra. Low-string sonority, which Yannick Nezet-Séguin has promised to make a priority (see the Pelléas post, 2/12/19) is part of what’s involved here. The other part is attack. A few instances from Act 1: the entrance of the choral basses at “Nous avons vu nos cités renversées” (allegro non troppo, with strong accenting in the orchestra—the beginning of a section that stacks the choirs’ entrances in ascending order for what a long-ago colleague of mine, nose crinkling, called “Biblical Counterpoint”); the angular motive that introduces Abimélech and underpins the first part of his episode; the churning staccato figure, ff, pesante, that launches the High Priest’s “Maudite à jamais la race“; and, after the prelude to Act 2, the propulsive, low-to-high intro to Dalila’s recitative that precedes “Amour, viens aider.” All these had nothing like the needed presence and punch. Nor was there compensation for this dearth in the higher, lighter regions: the lilting Act 1 Dance of Dagon’s Priestesses, for example, which can have considerable charm, was given no lift or pulse. From beginning to end, Elder led as if considering the music of no dramatic significance, just a layer of frosting without the cake. So the orchestra coasted along, patting the music on its primped-up head. Unlike the pit orchestras of times gone by, this one won’t go to the dramatic gesture unless pushed to do so. It will also not return to its designated chairs in the pit until good and ready to do that—this was yet another evening in which the whole house above orchestra level was given the distraction of not a few players making their way unconcernedly back (from intermission downtime, not offstage assignments) after the music had started. It’s insulting.