APT actors (from left) Ridge, Brennan and Mani helped explain the music.
The Madison Symphony Orchestra continued its popular “Beyond the Score” series with a dramatic exploration of Variations on an Original Theme, Enigma, Op. 36, by Edward Elgar. The series explores a single work with spoken dramatizations by actors, visual materials and musical illustrations.
In the March 18 presentation, Wisconsin Public Radio broadcaster Norman Gilliland provided a narrative frame for “Enigma Variations” with help from American Players Theatre actors: James Ridge (complete with Elgarian mustache) played the composer, and Kelsey Brennan and Brian Mani portrayed other key figures.
It was an entertaining, if not very systematic, exposition of what the successive variations described and what they meant to Elgar. (The famous “enigma” of a hidden theme beyond the presented one was never resolved.) There were good laughs, and, depending upon where you sat in the house, the diction of the speakers was variably clear.
What would aid the audience best in following the musical contents would be a straight performance, with the house lights up to allow following the music with the superbly detailed program notes written by Michael Allsen, variation by variation. Unfortunately, the lighting did not allow most audience members to read the notes.
To be sure, the MSO under John DeMain gave a strong, sonorous and richly colored performance of the entire score after the intermission, and the audience could certainly bathe in its lush pleasures, as a great half-hour of orchestral sound and textures. But it does seem to me that, once again, even a good example of the “Beyond the Score” format such as this falls far short of really giving the audience all the illumination it deserves.
After this program, audiences should come away with the realization that Elgar was a composer who left us a lot of other works that deserve to be heard frequently on this side of the Pond. Yes, we get the Cello Concerto, and maybe even the Violin Concerto, but few of the symphonic poems and rarely the two symphonies. And the oratorios?