So pleasant to see the Royal Opera House Orchestra liberated from the Covent Garden pit, parading its finery with Andrew Davis in this concert performance of Massenet’s opera. Even so, with an exotic, preposterous old bird like Thaïs – not staged at Covent Garden in more than 80 years – we wanted something more than evening-dressed singers and musicians, plus a background of brown boardroom panels.

We needed the plumes, the jewels, the banquet sweetmeats, the riotous dancers – all the courtesan heroine’s caravanserai. And the monk Athanaël’s lubricious vision in Act I, yanked from his secret desires: we heard its accompaniment from the wings, but where was the onstage agony, the lust?

Still, we did have Renée Fleming as Thaïs, from the plush 2000 recording. She was naughty in red for Acts I and II; demure in cream once she got religion. And whatever the dress, the voice stayed liquid gold. She leaped unfettered into the heights; in synch with the notes she swooned and slithered, dissolved into cackling cries, or faced mortality, heartfelt, in every word of the mirror aria.

The only cast member not using a score, Fleming was clearly dying to increase the acting. So were Ana James and Liora Grodnikaite, the eye-rolling slave girls. So, definitely, was Joseph Calleja, on top vocal form as Nicias – once Athanaël’s childhood chum, now Alexandria’s leading playboy.

If only Simone Alberghini (replacing an ill Thomas Hampson) hadn’t overdone the holy monk. Athanaël, we’re told, is “a man made to love”; he tells us himself in his Act III distress that his flesh is on fire. But the passion, allure, the bass-baritone vowels, stayed trapped and miniaturised, and the opera’s psychological drama suffered.

Nothing miniaturised, of course, about Massenet’s music – erotic one second, pious the next. Wisely, Davis never let cast or musicians get drunk on its dangerous perfume. In the Meditation, once the palm-court orchestra’s delight, the first violinist survived just with vibrato sobs. No need for buckets of tears, even in the outlandish Thaïs.

— Thaïs will be broadcast on Radio 3 on Nov 3

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