<<  -- 5 --  John Bell Young    A NEW 'ENOCH'

We wasted no time, exchanging e-mails and talking by phone. We enthused about Enoch, praising it as a treasury of artistic opportunities. What's more, we shared a vision of it as something intimate, rather than declamatory, surmising that it would benefit from the approach of a storyteller at the hearth.

As our agents negotiated, we made plans to meet in Los Angeles. Because I usually record in concert halls in New York or Boston, I was unfamiliar with the studio scene in LA. Fortunately, my colleague, Armin Watkins, formerly a professor of piano at the University of South Florida, recommended Sound Castle, a state-of-the art recording facility.

'I felt instinctively that a studio version could best bring out the delicacy and intimacy inherent in the text', Michael explains. 'Most of the characters -- even the outgoing Enoch -- speak with a tenderness that resists declamation. There are, of course, moments when the music rises to tumultuous peaks -- as when the returned castaway rails against his fate. But for the most part, sober English sang-froid prevails.'

A few weeks later I flew to LA, where Michael and I met for our first rehearsal at the comfortable Venice Beach home of Joe Handy, the recording's publicist. As Michael pulled into the driveway, my cell phone rang, delaying for a moment our proper introduction.

'The session was certainly invaluable in allowing John and myself, hitherto strangers, to get to know each other', muses Michael, 'and make our working relationship less tentative than that of the young tongue-tied Philip and his blushing Annie!'

Svelte, relaxed, and looking at least fifteen years younger than the sixtieth birthday he had just celebrated, Michael's versatility made it easy to see why he took so naturally to Enoch Arden. To young audiences he is the foppishly formal Basil Exposition in Goldmember and the other Austin Powers movies. But for many he will always be the hotheaded young Tybalt in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet; the morally ambiguous Brian, opposite Liza Minnelli in Cabaret; the revolutionary central character of the futuristic Logan's Run; or the swashbuckling lady's man D'Artagnan who woos Raquel Welch in the 1970s remake of The Three Musketeers.

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