Marc Verter is a pianist, song accompanist and concert producer. A passionate song performer, he dedicates much of his time to performing with singers in the UK and abroad. Mr Verter was the Artistic Director for over five years at the Chelsea Schubert Festival. Alongside his performing work Mr Verter is a highly sought after vocal coach and repetiteur. Previous opera engagements have included the Aix-en-Provence Festival, the Opera på Skeret programme in Sweden and the Dartington Festival in the UK. He is currently on the staff of the Vocal Department at the Guildhall School of Music, The Royal College of Music and Drama and West London University. He has performed at music festivals in Israel, North America and Europe and has played for such internationally renowned singers as Yvonne Kenny, Jonathan Lemalu, Nelly Miricioiu, Kate Royal, Sarah Walker and Chen Reiss. Through his doctoral studies Mr Verter has examined the musical settings of the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and he leads workshops with college students on the performance of French song. Mr Verter has developed and curated a salon concert series where a cast of musicians and actors recreates the glamour of 19th century Parisian musical soirees.

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Sebastian Wybrew has appeared with many of the UK’s most eminent performers, including Dame Felicity Lott, Christopher Maltman and Iestyn Davies. In 2014 he made his debut at Het Concertgebouw Amsterdam with Ian Bostridge, and his long-standing duo with Sophie Bevan saw them make their critically acclaimed Wigmore Hall debut in 2011. Sebastian Wybrew regularly performs at prestigious festivals throughout Europe including those of Aix-en-Provence, Edinburgh, Zaragoza, Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Sebastian Wybrew has received acclaim from Classical Music Magazine for his recording of Geoffrey Grey’s Partita with trumpeter Simon Cheney. He was awarded the Accompanist Prize at the 2010 John Kerr English Song Competition, and is a beneficiary of the Geoffrey Parsons Memorial Trust. In much demand as a pedagogue, he has been involved with the Keyboard Faculties at the Royal College of Music, the Edward Said Conservatory, the Fondation Royaumont and Musique en Côte Basque.

Victoria is an Associate of the Royal College of Music for Singing Performance and graduated in German from London University. She has devised and presented many programmes of German poetry and song, and has published a treatise on Die Winterreise, the collection of poems upon which Schubert’s Winterreise is based, called The Winter Journey of Wilhelm Müller. The songs of Robert Franz have always yielded interesting settings of German poetry, but curiosity was aroused by the frequent appearance of Osterwald among Franz’s 279 settings. With no preconceptions, the 51 songs, dispersed throughout Franz’s oeuvre, were located, studied and brought together for the first time. The decision was made by Victoria to publish her research and record the music. Victoria has been ably assisted by musicologist Iain Sneddon (Lieding Publications 2019), who has produced his own companion edition of the reprinted songs, containing translations and new findings by Victoria. In aiming for an outcome of the highest quality, all aspects of the recording project have benefited from the work of excellent artists and technicians, in optimum acoustic conditions, using a modern Steinway grand piano. Like Handel, Franz was quite indifferent to gender in performance, but it was felt variety of vocal timbre would enhance the listening experience, as would grouping the works into the four seasons with their corresponding moods or Stimmungen. The majority of these works appear to be previously unrecorded or recorded in transposed keys, which would not comply with the composer’s express wishes. All of the songs in this recording are in their original keys.