Recital:
Marion Wilmann – mezzo-soprano
Michael Round – piano

The Programme

Marion Wilmann – mezzo-soprano
Michael Round – piano

Eternal source of light divine

Music for a while

O thou bright sun – With darkness deep

O worse than death indeed – Angels ever bright and fair

Sweeter than roses

Lusinghe piu care

If music be the food of love

The Artists

Marion Wilmann was born in London and initially studied singing and piano at Trinity College of Music, following up with post-graduate vocal studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Marion has performed a wide range of repertoire including operatic roles, cantata solos and art songs in major concert halls throughout the UK and abroad including Sudan.
Michael Round has been a freelance orchestral and West-End keyboard player, teacher, arranger, accompanist, writer and editor. His proudest achievements as arranger were orchestrations of Ravel piano pieces, performed in the UK and USA and recorded for Octavia in Japan. A specialised interest in the music of Villa-Lobos prompted two visits to Rio de Janeiro and second prize in the 1988 International Villa-Lobos Piano Competition. He has retired from teaching, but continues to write for magazines and to play whenever the opportunities arise.

George Frideric Handel was strongly influenced both by the middle-German polyphonic choral tradition and by composers of the Italian Baroque. In turn, his music forms one of the peaks of the ‘high baroque’ style, bringing Italian opera to its highest development, creating the genres of English oratorio and organ concerto, and introducing a new style into English church music. He is consistently recognized as one of the greatest composers of his age.

Henry Purcell was the most important English composer of the middle Baroque period, most remembered for his songs, Dido and Aeneas, and his incidental music to a version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream – The Fairy Queen. In all genres of his compositions he showed an obvious admiration for the past combined with a willingness to learn from the present, particularly from his contemporaries in Italy. His inventiveness and originality makes him the most notable English composer of his time as well as one of the most original in Europe.