Dalila’s Hair

I: Samson et Dalila, Covent Garden, Wednesday 13

The main twist in the story of Samson and Delilah (Dalila in French) is that, as long as Samson’s hair stays long, he is invincible. For the first two acts of the current revival of Saint-Saëns’s opera “Samson et Dalila” at Covent Garden, SeokJong Baek (Samson) and Aigul Akhmetshina (Dalila) both have hair reaching down to their backsides in Acts One and Two. Okay: this might even be a factor in their attraction. 

Akhmetshina, however, kept flicking her hair backwards, as if the opera’s story depended more on her hair than his. Surely, a Dalila who behaves as if her own over-the-shoulder coiffure matters most is not a Dalila in whom one should place complete confidence. 

Admittedly, the Bakhshir-born Akhmetshina may well be the biggest talent to have emerged by way of Covent Garden’s Jette Parker scheme. She was in her early twenties when she sang various small roles there - and suddenly, around the time of her twenty-third birthday (2019), she took the Covent Garden stage by storm as Carmen. (The performance was broadcast - watched it in Trafalgar Square.) She did so in a terrible production - Carmen in a gorilla suit - and yet she persuaded all who saw her that she was one of nature’s Carmens. After the pandemic, she became the most in-demand Carmen in the world, singing the role in eight different productions. Now that she is thirty, you can still hear and see why she’s a Carmen: she’s a handsome woman, with features that read well onstage, and a superb mezzosoprano voice, firm and incisive while also seeming the quintessence of luxe and volupté in its flow over some two octaves. 

Yet she sings as if words aren’t her first priority (surely they were more distinct in 2019), and probably not her second or third one either. When Covent Garden staged a new “Carmen” around her in 2024, it was dismaying to hear how unconcerned this now top-ranking Carmen now was with sounding her French words. 

This week, she did the same as Dalila, Even such stunning declarations about Samson as “Il est à moi - c’est mon esclave” (“He belongs to me - he is my slave”) failed to make any impact. Especially in the first two acts, she sang in an almost consonant-free (and imprecisely vowelled) version of French. Many Russian singers have sung Western languages with impenetrably strong Russian accents, but most of them have at least shown that they knew what the words were. Not so Akhmetshina. 

Much the same is true of her physicality. She looks good until you realise she’s merely comfortable onstage about her physique - not all singers are - and that her actual acting boils down to just a very few obvious ideas of how a seductress might move. Such as flicking her hair back over her shoulders: again and again; and again. (In 2022, this production’s first Dalila, the glorious Elina Garanča, played with Samson’s hair, an idea that Akhmetshina’s mind.)

The Korean tenor SeokJong Baek, Samson to her Dalila, is more or less her diametric opposite. He’s not a theatrically natural performer; but his stage manners are marvellously focused. Though he doesn’t make a completely French sound, he places every French word so that it registers musically. The premiere of this production in 2022 was the occasion of his official debut as a tenor - he had been transitioning from baritone status. His tenor career has progressed well since then; his increased assurance and focus as Samson are proof of the success of that transition. He’s not just a tenor: he’s a heroic tenor, with a sense of line both classical and lyrical.

The British conductor, Alexander Soddy, did splendidly by Saint-Saëns’s score, so that its drama was already deep under my skin before anyone had sung a word. Ossian Huskinson makes an entirely fine impression as Dalila’s kinsman Abimélech; William Thomas sings well as Samson’s Rabbi; but Lucasz Gorlinski is coarse as the high priest of Dagon. The production, by Richard Jones, still holds the attention, but it doesn’t deepen the drama. Its Philistines are worshippers of Mammon;  their palace is a cartoon version of Las Vegas. Both Israel and its enemies deserve to be taken more seriously than this. 

II: Nicky Spence, tenor and proud parent 

Nicky Spence, the tenor who was to have sung that very Samson in 2022 (injury prevented him), is different again. If you knew nothing of either tenor but were asked to guess which had been a baritone, you’d probably choose guess Spence: his sound is chestier and larger - whereas Baek has some of the vocal ping of a bel canto singer. 

Spence’s ascent has been by way of singing Wagnerian roles. (I hope London soon hears his Siegmund again.) At the Wigmore Hall on May 9, however, he was singing as proud parent: since he and his husband are devoted parents, he sang songs about childhood, parenthood, and love. 

He did so in four languages - English, French, German, Russian. No, he’s another who doesn’t sing with good foreign accents - yet he’s so firm in his diction that I imagine that French, German, and even Russian speakers would nonethless understand his every word. Although not all his songs were of joy, he’s a joyous performer: a happy embodiment of gay pride.

III: Rosas at Sadler’s Wells

The Belgian choreographer Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker became an international presence in the late 1980s with her female quartet, “Rosas”, in which four women in boots created rhythm out of silence by chugging and stomping their way for an hour. You could compare it to Twyla Tharp’s “The Fugue” (1970), a work that, when new with three women, seemed a statement of Women’s Lib to some observers; but Tharp changed “The Fugue” by casting men - elegantly dressed and shod men - and showing it to be a dance primarily about the creation of sophisticated aural rhythm. De Keersmaeker’s “Rosas”, by contrast, was never of much interest as rhythm. It had some kind of blunt feminist force on first viewing, but, when seen again (I remember its return to London at some point in the 1990s), it was monolithic: mind-numbing rather than stirring.

Rosas in due course became the name of the de Keersmaeker company - with which she has tackled musical works from Bach to Steve Reich. As danced at Sadler’s Wells, “Il Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Inventione”, a recent ninety-minute work, performed mainly to silence but with occasional chunks of Vivaldi (“The Four Seasons”, of course - de Keersmaeker made sure that the name of each season was projected in large capital letters on the backdrop). It was for four men, moving in ways that looked endebted to “Opal Loop” (1980), another work in silence, this time by Tharp’s contemporary Trisha Brown. The difference is that Brown’s movement was ultimately sensuous (as, in other ways, was that of “The Fugue”), whereas de Keermaker’s men take neither rhythm nor sensuousness far. When clips of Vivaldi play, these men can move in time to the music - but always to a time always simpler than the music’s. The gap between the dancers and the music was vast: the spectacle of clod-hoppers (the Rosas men are not light on their feet) plodding and turning to Vivaldi’s brilliance is not inspiring.

Some in the audience seemed as flummmoxed (and bored) by “Il Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Inventione” as I. Far more flummoxing, however, were those who stood to ovate as if this had been an important aesthetic experience. What did they think they had seen and had felt?

<First published in Norman Lebrecht’s Slipped Disc, May 16, 2026>

@Alastair Macaulay, 2026