First performance by Gerald English (tenor), Alice Evans (violin), Michael Askill (tubular bell), Huntington Estate Winery, Mudgee, NSW, 30 November 1991
Program note
An epithalamium (or epithalamion) is a song after a wedding. This one sets words from the wedding scene of Ferdinand and Miranda in Act IV of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The words themselves may or may not be by Shakespeare – a number of Shakespeare scholars have their doubts that he wrote this part of the play – but the blessing delivered by the three spirits, in the forms of the goddesses Juno, Ceres and Iris, contains some delightful imagery.