Jan Peerce, too, was nearing the end of his prime years, and was never a Samson in any case. ^(I) In purely lyrical moments, as when he joins Dalila in the second verse of “Mon coeur,” his singing is pleasurable. The rest of the time, he’s ramming his voice at the notes, too often with thin, tight results. Robert Merrill joins the fray for “Gloire à Dagon,” sounding terrific though not Gallic.

But here is the reason to look this record up: the Bacchanale is exhilarating and hair-raising—I’ve never heard one to match it. The recording seems to have been made in 1954, during the short interregnum between Toscanini’s retirement and the orchestra’s re-organization as The Symphony of the Air, so we are getting Toscanini’s band as led by Stokowski (they all knew one another well), and from the first snap of the solo oboe to the wild full-orchestra pulses of the finale, there is an unparalleled combination of rhythmic urgency and unanimity with the most vivid of timbral palettes. Furthermore, Victor wasn’t lying: the engineering is superb, and illustrates how it was possible that, when alternate mono and stereo versions of the same recording began to appear a few years later, it was sometimes altogether rational to prefer the mono. The New Orthophonic pressing, unlike many of the Dynagroove (“Dynawarp”) samples of the ’60s, has held up well, too. I have not heard the CD that is currently available as part of the Stokowski Society series, but if it has preserved the LP’s aura, it’s very worth a search.

Just three years later, Victor did another disc of extended Samson excerpts, again with an increasingly tattered-sounding Stevens, and I wonder what was going on. Mario del Monaco had been singing Samson at the Met, and according to Roger Dettmer, who reviewed this effort for High Fidelity, the recording was made in Boston’s Symphony Hall during the company’s 1958 spring tour. Del Monaco, though, was an exclusive Decca/London artist, so this must have been a onetime loan-out. Why Victor saw value in competing against its own release with a performance inferior in every way (the two were on the market together for at least a few years), I can’t say. I know: Del Monaco. But it’s Del Monaco at his worst, smearing impatiently through the music in a contemptuous approximation of French, and with signs of technical indecision. The bell-ringing high notes are there, but even they grow wearisome, being about nothing but themselves. This is also the most stingily annotated commercial release I can recall coming across. The jacket’s verso sports five little square black-and-white photos of the soloists and the conductor (Fausto Cleva), and that’s all. The orchestra knows the music and doesn’t play it badly, but there’s no comparison with NBC/Stokowski. I detect nothing of Symphony Hall’s acoustic. So unless you’re a true documentarian (the redaction is somewhat different from LM 1848’s, and there are snippets of Ezio Flagello as Abimélech, Clifford Harvuot as the High Priest), you can let this one lie in its tomba oscura. If anyone knows its story, though, let me hear from you.

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While still in Samson mode and hoping to wash out the look of the Met production, I read somewhere that contrary to what we might assume, the old Hollywood Biblical and Greco-Roman extravaganzas were actually pretty good when it came to simulation of authenticity of location and costume. So I took a look back at Cecil B. De Mille’s film. I can’t vouch for the places and clothes, though they’re nice to look at. Hedy Lamarr is cute and feisty, Victor Mature handsome. The script is embarrassing and the acting prevailingly bad, with George Sanders the lone escapee by virtue of continuing to be George Sanders, whatever the context. Two good scenes, though: the collapse of the temple and, earlier, a spectacularly well-staged wrestling match between Samson and a lion (that really is Mature mixing it up in there, at least enough of the time to fool us), following which Mature fends off a cuddly advance from Lamarr with one excellent line: “One cat at a time.”

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And NEXT TIME, two weeks hence: The third, and positively last, installment of “Chaliapin, Phenomenon.”