Strauss: Enoch Arden
Emanuel Ax (piano) & Patrick Stewart
The traditions of speaking with and over music gained a new lease of life in 19th-century bourgeois drawing rooms, fed especially by Schumann and Liszt, two of Strauss's idols. As he would later...
Strauss: Enoch Arden
Emanuel Ax (piano) & Patrick Stewart
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The traditions of speaking with and over music gained a new lease of life in 19th-century bourgeois drawing rooms, fed especially by Schumann and Liszt, two of Strauss's idols. As he would later...
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Contents and tracklist
Strauss, R:
Enoch Arden, Op. 38, A melodrama for piano and speaker after Alfred Lord Tennyson
Work length53:04
- Patrick Stewart (speaker), Emanuel Ax (piano)
Awards and reviews
2010
The traditions of speaking with and over music gained a new lease of life in 19th-century bourgeois drawing rooms, fed especially by Schumann and Liszt, two of Strauss's idols. As he would later with the Alpine Symphony and Die Frau ohneSchatten, Strauss often tried to surpass his models in scale and ambition, setting (in 1897) a full-on 50 minutes of Tennysonian neuroses about the Victorian male's ever-present fear that he would journey overseas in the service of family and Empire, only to return unrecognised and excluded (in this poem, voluntarily) from hearth and home.
The genius of Enoch Arden lies in Strauss's positioning of the actually rather small amount of music: he introduces, interludes and comments on the narrative, but only rarely underpins it. The actor has to take much of the initiative in style and pacing. He must decide whether to remain glowingly neutral, as the veteran Claude Rains does with Glenn Gould (Sony) or pitch in and characterise both the ménage à trois at the centre of the tale and the dramatic locations of the story as does Fischer-Dieskau (DG).
Patrick Stewart has a naturally compelling voice.
He opts for a soft Northern burr for Enoch, friend Philip and their girl Annie, and a cunning use of volume and pace for the story's dramatic peaks.
Ax, whose spacious, fluent control and use of colours as if lit from behind often remind one of Schnabel, partners perfectly, taking deliberately a more neutral line. The recording is natural and free of trickery. Whoever's idea it was to follow the melodrama with two of the Op 3 piano pieces has provided the ideal wind-down after Strauss's (intentionally) short and unmelodramatic postlude.
Hugely recommended.
December 2007
Patrick Stewart has a naturally compelling voice. He opts for a soft Northern burr for Enoch, friend Philip and their girl Annie, and a cunning use of volume and pace for the story's dramatic peaks. Ax, whose spacious, fluent control and use of colours as if lit from behind often remind one of Schnabel, partners perfectly, taking deliberately a more neutral line. Hugely recommended.
