Enoch Arden

Melodrama for Speaker and Piano

By: Alfred Lord Tennyson, Richard Strauss - music

Narrated by: Benjamin Luxon, Frederick Moyer - piano

Continuing a collaboration started years ago with a performance at Tanglewood of Schubert' Die Schone Mullerin, Benjamin Luxon and Frederick Moyer now turn to the little-explored genre of music for piano and narrator.

Enoch Arden first came to international attention with a recording by Claude Raines and Glenn Gould, but it has since drifted back to obscurity. This is a work that both Luxon and Moyer have loved for many years. The poem is immediately accessible to any audience and tells a heart-wrenching story of friendship, love, separation, and sacrifice. The masterful score creates a powerful soundtrack to the saga. Music by Richard Strauss, performed on piano by Frederick Moyer.

Public Domain (P)2011 JRI Recordings

Critic reviews

"They sound joined at the hip as collaborators. Luxon's colourful, poignant declamation of the text is matched with superb fluency of gesture and detail by Moyer, who brings an almost Schumannesque sense of dark, light and rapture to Strauss's prismatic score. The performance draws you into the tale with the kind of wonder millions experience while immersing themselves in the adventures of Harry Potter." ( Gramophone)

"Coming from a composer most celebrated for his lush symphonic writing and soaring vocal lines, Richard Strauss` setting of Tennyson`s romantic epic Enoch Arden is a decided oddity - a long 75-minute poetry reading scored for speaker and piano. Yet Strauss brings such acute sensitivity and dramatic sweep to his setting of Tennyson's melodrama that it makes the saga of a decades-long love triangle breathe with renewed life. Benjamin Luxon`s career was curtailed by hearing loss in the 1990s. Yet, backed by the sterling keyboard work of Frederick Moyer, the English baritone`s intensely committed reading of the text makes a uniquely musical performance in itself. Luxon narrates with exemplary diction and his nuanced phrasing and subtle illumination of every detail of Tennyson's ornate lines makes for a compelling and ultimately moving experience…. Beautifully recorded." ( Florida Sun-Sentinel)