Originally posted September 10, 2003 01:20 AM

Thanks for asking. The concerts went splendidly, and the public and critical reception was, in a word, overwhelming. Playing in the magnificent Hall of State at the Royal Palace in Stockholm was a wonderful experience, in spite of the extremely hot weather, and no air conditioning. More climatically comfortable was the small but charming hall at the artists colony Gerlesborsskolan in the Swedish countryside north of Gothenberg, abutting a fjord.

Of especial interest was our performance at Farringford, Tennyson's estate on the Isle oF Wight in England. This, too, was a remarkable experience, not the least because while there I roamed the very down, beaches and cliffs he so picaresquely describes in Enoch Arden. Behind the house is a wood which lets out on to a vast grassy plain; it was here that Tennyson wrote Enoch Arden in a small shack that has long since been dismantled. But the foundations of it remain. While there, on a particularly gentle English morning, I made a make-shift seat in the remaining stone margins of the foundation, and listened to our recording on my portable CD player. Seeing more or less what Tennyson saw as he was writing it, I must say it was all just a bit spooky.

My esteemed colleague, the splendid Norwegian pianist Gunnar Sama kindly summarizes our review in the Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's largest newspaper.
http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=1323&a=167858

"Martin Nystrom writes quite a lot about "Enoch Arden". Michael York gets most of his very positive remarks. And he evidently likes your playing very much. He calls your playing "blixtrande" which could probably be translated with "thundering"and/or "brilliant". I will translate just the first sentence from the penultimate passage where M Nystrom writes about your performance:

"Already in the short, almost hurricane like program before the intermission - with texts by Whitman and John Masefield to the music by Skrjabin and Wagner - was it clear that this should be an evening where elemental force was wedded to the most sensual intimacy".

Our recording of Strauss's Enoch Arden, on the Americus label, is available from www.americuscd.com There are not nor will there be any recordings of our live performances. For a signed copy, email me for details on how to order at imca@tampabay.rr.com

John Bell Young