harmonia mundi (en)

Exalted melancholy A violin and a lute: with this choice line-up, our pair of instrumentalists – and frequent partners on the current Baroque music scene – illuminates some aspects of an elusive amalgam that constitutes the 17th-century English notion of melancholy. The inconsolable ‘Mad Lover’ of the album title is reimagined by Théotime Langlois de Swarte and Thomas Dunford as a character from the reign of Charles II: a tale told through music from the pen of such violin virtuosos as the prodigiously gifted Nicola Matteis. Heightened by the exuberance and abandon common to those musicians transplanted from Italy, the beguiling nuances of this language of yearning and loss continue to echo in the popular music of our time.