Made in tandem with concert performances in Toronto last November, Andrew Davis’s recording of Massenet’s great parable about sex and religion is the first to appear on CD since Yves Abel’s much-admired Decca set 20 years ago. Though not perfect, it has its advantages. Davis clearly has a great fondness for the score, which has been in his repertory for some time now – he memorably conducted it at the 2011 Edinburgh Festival, also with Erin Wall as Thaïs – and his understanding of Massenet’s often deliberate blurring of the dividing line between sensual and spiritual experience is unquestionably acute.

The playing is excellent, with a refined sensuousness of texture throughout, even in the opening scene among the Cenobites on the bank of the Nile. We’re constantly reminded of how Massenet’s post-Wagnerian chromaticism maps out the courses both of Athanaël’s repressed desire and Thaïs’s approaching sainthood, while the orientalisms seem properly woven into the work’s fabric here, rather than imposed upon it simply as local colour. The big duets for the central couple have tremendous intensity, while the cataclysmic final interlude, in which Athanaël rushes headlong into a storm that mirrors the crisis within his own soul, is just thrilling.

Yet for all that, there are things that don’t quite work. The brass sound too far forwards in the evocation of Alexandria that opens the second scene and we miss some of the richness of detail in strings and wind that we find in Lorin Maazel’s 1977 EMI recording with the New Philharmonia. Davis’s tempo for Thaïs’s ‘Ô mon miroir fidèle’ is on the slow side, which undermines its urgency. More detrimental, perhaps, is his decision – here, as in Edinburgh – to cut the Act 2 ballet virtually in its entirety (only the Charmeuse scene is retained), which comes dangerously close to pulling the act’s structure out of shape, and means we also lose some of Massenet’s most attractive dance music in the process.

Vocally, the set is strong, though in the exacting title-role Wall hasn’t quite the vocal ease of Abel’s Renée Fleming, with some strain in her upper registers, and the top D in the mirror aria ducked. Elsewhere, though, her tone is warm and beguiling, her dramatic commitment rarely in doubt. ‘C’est Thaïs, l’idole fragile’ in her opening scene has disarming poise, and there’s a real surge of emotion at the climax of the Act 2 duet with Joshua Hopkins’s outstanding Athanaël. His is a remarkable, unforgettable performance, sung with consistently expressive beauty, and quite superbly characterised, with every second of Athanaël’s progress from prurient fanaticism to desire, atheism and despair registering with quite astonishing vividness.

There’s some fine singing elsewhere, too. Andrew Staples makes an elegant Nicias, charming and vapid in this instance, rather than worldly wise. Liv Redpath and Andrea Ludwig are delightful as Crobyle and Myrtale, Nathan Berg does much with little as Palémon and the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir remind us just how beautiful Massenet’s often understated choral writing can be. The recording itself sounds sumptuous, though the orchestra occasionally at times threatens to overpower the singers at full throttle. It faces stiff competition, though, from Abel’s set, less so from Maazel’s, whose Thaïs, Beverly Sills, is by no means entirely persuasive – and both Maazel and Abel retain the ballet, giving us the score absolutely complete. Hopkins, however, makes the new recording more than well worth hearing, despite the occasional inequalities of the rest of it.