Violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte, hailed by The Strad as “a stunner by any standard,” and lutenist Thomas Dunford, dubbed by BBC Music Magazine the “Eric Clapton of the lute,” illuminate the elusive amalgam that is the seventeenth-century English notion of melancholy. Through music by John Eccles, Henry and Daniel Purcell, Henry Eccles, and the prodigiously gifted Nicola Matteis, the inconsolable “Mad Lover” of the title is reimagined as a figure from the reign of Charles II, his story unfolding in a sound world shaped by yearning, theatricality, and virtuosity. Heightened by the exuberance and freedom brought by musicians transplanted from Italy, this language of loss and longing feels strikingly alive, its beguiling nuances still echoing in the expressive world of our own time.
