Vivaldi and the violin concerto? Vivaldi is the violin concerto! One must get past the cliché (‘Vivaldi composed the same concerto 500 times’) to understand the extent to which composer, instrument and genre form an indissoluble whole; and that is what Théotime Langlois de Swarte and the musicians of Le Consort have set out to do. From his early youth in Venice to his last days in Vienna, the ‘red-haired priest’ pushed back technical and academic boundaries, constantly creating new narrative forms: the journey of a lifetime.

‘Not only do I like, admire, and adore your music, I have fallen in love with it, and am still smitten,’ wrote the young Marcel Proust to Gabriel Fauré in 1897. And added, ‘I know your work well enough to write a 300-page volume about it.’ Clearly, In Search of Lost Time is not a book devoted to Fauré, but this composer occupies a more important place therein than has been noted. Along with Reynaldo Hahn, Fauré was the mentor and guiding light of the author’s early years when the young man drew on his conversations with the master and on a re-hearing of Fauré’s scores to expand his musical knowledge and creative thought: ‘I spoke at great length with Fauré last night,’ a 24-year-old Proust confided to Hahn as early as 1895.

Violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte and lutist Thomas Dunford illuminate aspects of the elusive amalgamation that is the 17th-century English notion of melancholy. The inconsolable 'Mad Lover' of the album title is reimagined as a character from the reign of Charles II. This tale is 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.

Commissioned by the Comte d’Ogny for the Le Concert de la Loge Olympique, the ‘Paris’ Symphonies form a key milestone in Haydn’s output.

Violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte and harpsichordist Justin Taylor, two of the most promising virtuosos of the new generation and founder members of the ensemble Le Consort, now present a duo album that pays tribute to a great eighteenth-century dynasty of musicians, the violinists and composers of the Francoeur family.