Richard Strauss’ Enoch Arden Op. 38, composed in 1897, is an unusual work, and one written in a style which has rather profoundly gone out of fashion. For narrator and piano, it’s one of a rather surprisingly high number of 19th-century works that enlist an actor, but when was the last time you saw a performance of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique sequel Lélio, for instance? Likewise, other than Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, not much of the 20th-century narrator/accompaniment repertoire gets performed as regularly as it should, either.

Matthew Connell in a still from Enoch ArdenMatthew Connell in a still from Enoch Arden. Image © Jak Scanlon

Perhaps the comparative neglect of this genre of music is because the audience’s attention can become a little one-sided; Strauss’ music here is very much secondary to the work of the narrator reading Lord Tennyson’s poem of the same name. If you imagine the turn-of-the-century equivalent of an audiobook – plenty of speech, music is secondary – then you’ll be in the right headspace.

Tennyson’s poem isn’t far off from a retelling of the myth of Odysseus; in Enoch...