Golden-Voiced Professor

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 283, 24 November 1944, Page 8

Golden-Voiced Professor

|F he broadcast in America, that land of the apotheosis, 4YA’s Professor Adams would probably have acquired some such title as the Man with the Golden Voice. Since this is Dunedin, let’s say ‘conservatively that most of us could listen with pleasure even if he read nothing but the fat stock prices. And what could be a lovelier introduction to "Readings from Tennyson" than the Delius "Summer Night on the River"?after which I rather expected Professor Adams to drowse his way into the "Lotus-Eaters."’ Instead, we had" an abbreviated reading from "Enoch Arden." Parts of this poem I remember "doing" at school, a painful process which left me with a prejudice against it. I was surprised, then, to find it come alive for me under Professor Adams’s treatment, The scenes on the island, where the shipwrecked Enoch watches his two friends

die, yet lives on amid scenes of abhorred grandeur, are the most vivid part of the poem. Enoch’s homecoming, to find his wife happy though bigamous, and his subsequent renunciation and death, seem a little Victorian in sentiment nowadays, but I found myself surprised when Professor Adams gave a lengthy list of familiar lines from "Tennyson, whom he described as having fed the language by stealth. Tennyson may seem "dated" to many a modern ear, but there is no doubt about it, he is one of the best poets to select for the Gentle Art of Reading Aloud.