*** If anyone has ever doubted the restorative power of music, they need only have been in City Hall Theatre on Monday night to listen to visiting baritone Mark Wildman prove its existence.

On that particular evening, I was not, I admit, in the best frame of mind to sit in some uncomfortable theatre seating for two hours of English and German chamber songs.

On that day, life and the world had seen fit, you see, to conspire against me, and a minor crise de coeur had consequently set in.

Fortunately for me, though, and for the criminally few audience members who attended Monday's recital, life, the world and specifically Mr. Graham Garton of the year-old Bermuda Academy of Music had also conspired to bring Mr.

Wildman, a professor and former student at the Royal Academy of Music and a fellow of both the RAM and the Royal Society of Arts, to Bermuda that day.

Mr. Wildman, whose wide-reaching performance schedule has taken him throughout Europe, to the US and to the premiere performance of Norwegian composer Bjame Slogedal's "Te adoro'' at Kristiansand Cathedral last year, was literally like a tonic, his rich and extremely powerful voice a musical remedy for the troubled or world-weary soul.

At his best -- the achingly romantic "Limehouse Reach'' of Michael Head, the dirge-like but strangely hopeful "Welcome, Death!'' by John Stanley -- Mr.

Wildman took his listeners, who were initially strangely reticent in their shows of appreciation on Monday, to the very places that his featured composers wanted them to be: the heights, for example, of artistic rapture, the lows of melancholia.

And it mattered not that many of the songs which Mr. Wildman sang were in German. In fact, it was the German songs, delivered by the baritone in a deft and passionate manner, that were among the most deeply moving.

From Schubert's paean to the "Greek heroes and their works'' in "An die Leier'' to the operatic intensity of Brahms' Bible-based "serious songs'' ("Vier ernste Gesange''), it was not the words in the songs that mattered ultimately, but their sentiments, their feel.

(This, incidentally, should serve as a reminder to opera house managers who insist on installing computerised surtitles over their stages worldwide that literal meaning in music -- especially opera -- is frequently secondary to spectacle, to emotion.) In the case of this week's recital, moreover, Mr. Wildman's interpretive powers were only enhanced and intensified by the expert piano playing of Mr.

Iain Ledingham, a former music staffer at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera.

Together, he and Mr. Wildman weaved a marvellous tapestry of song and emotion in the hall, transporting some in the theatre audience, unexaggeratedly, onto a higher plane at times.

In retrospect, it was entirely unsurprising that Mr. Wildman chose to sing, among other pieces, Schubert's "An die Musik'' in the first act of the evening.

Written by the composer in the early 18th century, the song is Schubert's ode to the art of music, an act of thanksgiving.

On Monday night, it was also a sentiment that many seemed to share.

DANNY SINOPOLI BARITONE -- Mr. Mark Wildman.