Enoch Arden
Olveston
Monday, October 13
The perfectly married musical score, set by Richard Strauss in 1897, provides an epic recitation for speaker and piano, narrated by John Drummond and played by Terence Dennis.
The melodrama focuses on the distraught demise of the eponymous seaman, who dies forlorn having discovered that, after he has spent some years lost on a desert island, his wife has remarried his rival.
With hints of both Robinson Crusoe and biblical illumination, alongside a yearning, impassioned storyline throughout, Tennyson's Enoch Arden is a work of great dramatic and emotional depth.
The rendering of this Tennyson-Strauss combination was quite superb, and clearly moved the audience that filled the Olveston Drawing Room. Drummond's delivery of the text was filled with warmth, sensitivity and thorough fluency for the subtle nuances of the script; in particular, Drummond's conveyance displayed a strongly endearing sense of kindness in the lead character that left the audience feeling transported at the close of this one-hour performance.
The sense of contrast and character development that becomes apparent throughout the sequence of the narrative is one of the hallmarks of this work; this is particularly noticeable through the poignant amalgamation of text and music, conveyed exquisitely by Terence Dennis.
Strauss' extensive use of the leitmotif lends even greater enhancement to how the text and its characters can be understood. Dennis' combination of subtle, sensitive accompaniments and emotive, rippling solo passages highlight not only crucial anchors within the work, but also display that fantastically unsettling atmosphere of tonal ambiguity, leaving the listener constantly deliberating the next turn in the story.
Both John Drummond and Terence Dennis are to be thanked for their graceful collaboration and thoroughly commanding portrayal of this great melodrama, one that has enriched this arts festival.
- Reviewed by George Chittenden
