Programme

John Eccles (v. 1668 - 1735)

Ground from The Mad Lover suite (Aire V)

Daniel Purcell (v. 1664 - 1717)

Sonata in F minor

Improvisation for solo lute

Nicola Matteis (v. 1650 - v. 1714)

La Folia

Nicola Matteis Jr. (v. 1670 - 1737)

Fantasia in A minor

Nicola Matteis

Suite in A minor - Sarabanda Amorosa (Book 1: Ayres for the Violin) 

Suite in C major (Book 1: Ayres for the Violin)

Henry Purcell (1659 - 1695)

Prelude in G minor, ZN. 773

Henry Eccles (v. 1680 - v. 1740)

Sonata in G minor

Nicola Matteis

Suite in G major (Book 2: Ayres for the Violin)

Henry Eccles

Sonata Quinta in E minor

John Eccles

Ground from The Mad Lover suite (Aire III)

Performers

Lute: Thomas Dunford 

Violin: Théotime Langlois de Swarte 

Programme Notes

The Mad Lover began life around 1616 as a comedy by the prolific and versatile English dramatist John Fletcher. A younger contemporary of William Shakespeare (with whom he collaborated on two plays) Fletcher was a master of lively situations and thrilling plots, whose female characters are bold, venturesome women prepared to challenge and outwit their male counterparts at every turn.

Fletcher’s eponymous mad lover is Memnon, a seasoned soldier with many victories to his credit, but someone who finds himself completely baffled by the peacetime experience of falling in love with the beautiful Princess Calis. The drama, set amid a sophisticated ambience in the fictional kingdom of Paphos, plays with the impact of extreme emotional states and the treatment of these through the use of illusion and deceit. Episodes of this kind include a mock funeral, a sham marriage and a bogus consultation of a sacred oracle.

Cleverly plotted, with vigorous dialogue and rewarding character roles, The Mad Lover remained a popular play on the London stage for many years. In 1695 it was received at the New Theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where the original text was embellished with three special-composed masques by Peter Motteux.  From a refugee French Huguenot family, Motteux was a gifted lyricist and translator who had worked closely with Henry Purcell. He was clearly interested in promoting types of entertainment that involved mixed media, either through the popular ‘semi-opera’ genre represented by Purcell’s King Arthur and The Fairy Queen or by introducing narrative ballet elements pioneered by England’s first great choreographer, the dance teacher John Weaver.

Star of this new ‘Mad Lover’ was Anne Bracegirdle, then at the height of her fame.  ‘Mrs Bracegirdle’, writes a contemporary, ‘was now but just blooming to her maturity, her reputation as an actress rising with that of her person – never any woman was in such favour with her spectators as the darling of the theatre’. She had already been the cause of a notorious duel in which one of her fellow actors was stabbed to death. Several dramatists, when writing roles for her, ‘seemed palpably to plead their own passions and make their private courts to her in fictitious characters’.

Bracegirdle’s theatrical range embraced a special talent for playing characters in the throes of mental disorder. Several composers had written ‘mad scenes’ for this brilliant young star, among them her singing teacher John Eccles, who himself was clearly smitten by his pupil.  His score for the new version of Fletcher’s play, besides its three masques, included an abundance of instrumental pieces such as the cheerful Ground, using one of the Restoration’s most popular musical forms.

Some years earlier Anne Bracegirdle had scored a notable success in Don Quixote, a play by Thomas D’Urfey based on Cervantes’s classic novel, with musical interludes supplied by Henry Purcell and others. Whether the Don himself is mad provides a question for the story’s readers to answer, but his exploits inspired opera composers from Giovanni Paisiello to Jules Massenet. In 1727, for the Austrian imperial court in Vienna, Antonio Caldara wrote Don Chisciotte in Corte alla Duchessa with ballet numbers furnished by Nicola Matteis the Younger.

Matteis was the son of an extraordinary Neapolitan violinist known in England, where he spent most of his career, as ‘Old Nicola’. The father passed much of his skill to the child, so that some people claimed to have heard the boy working wonders on the instrument while still in baby clothes. Young Nicola, not content with a London audience, looked further afield, eventually becoming a concert master in Vienna, where he wrote dance music for the court and dazzled listeners with his violin technique. He had, as contemporary writer Roger North noted, ‘a spring so active that during his trill the sound was stopped because the notes had not time to sound’. The Fantasia performed here is a striking mixture of lyricism and virtuosity, creating a kind of proto-romantic sound world long before Romanticism took hold of European music.

In seventeenth-century England, where Nicola had learned his art, violinists were often thought to be a trifle crazy. This was certainly the case with Matteis’s father, ‘Old Nicola’, whose playing is described by the diarist John Evelyn as though the artist himself were a magician. Listening to ‘that stupendous violin Signor Nicola’, he concluded that ‘certainly never mortal man exceeded on that instrument: he had a stroke so sweet and made it speak like the voice of a man, and when he pleased, like a consort of several instruments ... he was an excellent composer also’.

Matteis’s compositions, published from 1676 onwards as Ayres for the Violin, featured disparate pieces gathered together in sequence as sonatas. To their conventional titles, ‘Preludio’, ‘Fuga’, ‘Aria’, ‘Jig’ and soon, he chose to attach additional descriptions, such as ‘A serious thing with double stops’, ‘A brisk thing’ or ‘A pretty hard ground’. Though Matteis was deliberately trying to affect a blending of his Italian manner with the traditional English viol consort style –Roger North calls this ‘promiscuous joining’ – there’s a sense that the composer was deliberately challenging violinists to emulate him as artist and virtuoso, even if he kept a good many technical secrets to himself. In the G major suite from Book 2 of Ayres for the Violin, Matteis’s mercurial and inventive genius creates a bewildering variety of moods. Even in his handling of the well-known ‘La Folia’ framework, which started life two centuries earlier in Portugal and Spain, he contrives to set a personal seal on this time-honoured trope. In the C major suite, meanwhile, we are reminded of lines from his English contemporary, the poet John Dryden:

‘Great wits are oft to madness near allied,

And thin partitions do their bounds divide’,

a truth which ‘Old Nicola’ seems determined to prove in this most fanciful of journeys across a well-known saraband-style ground bass. It was not so much madness as eccentricity, or sometimes just pure perversity, which characterised the family of John Eccles. His uncle Solomon was a keyboard player and teacher who underwent a drastic religious conversion to Quakerism that drove him to run naked through the streets with a pan of red-hot coals tied to his head, preaching repentance for sin. John himself was a temperamental character, whose career ended in disappointment when he dawdled too long over completing a score for William Congreve’s Semele (later set by Handel) and retired in disgust to a country retreat where he spent the next thirty years in fishing rather than composing. His young brother Henry was a skilled violinist who attached himself to the household of the Duc d’Aumont, France’s ambassador to the court of Queen Anne. When the duke returned to Paris, Eccles formed part of his entourage, later publishing two sets of violin sonatas. Each collection was subsequently found to contain movements freely plagiarised from works by Giuseppe Valentini and Francesco Bonporti. The latter certainly composed the bustling ‘Corrente’ in the G minor sonata, though its attractive outer movements are Eccles’ own, and so, as far as we know, is the E minor sonata.  

A more original composer was Daniel Purcell, once thought to have been brother of the great Henry but now believed to be a cousin. As the violin sonata included in this programme proves, he was ready to take hints from his illustrious relative, especially as regards its plaintive slow movement and the rumbustious concluding jig. Nothing, however, could be more distant in mood and idiom from this urbane little piece than ‘Young Nicola’s Fantasia con discretione, meditative, poetic and introspective, one of the finest pieces for solo violin from the Baroque period.

Jonathan Keates

Biographies

Thomas Dunford: Lute

Thomas Dunford studied lute with Claire Antonini, Charles-Edouard Fantin and Hopkison Smith and in masterclasses with Rolf Lislevand, Julian Bream, Eugène Ferré, Paul O’Dette, Pascale Boquet, Benjamin Perrot and Eduardo Eguez.

In 2003, Thomas made his debuts in the role of the lutenist in Twelfth Night by Shakespeare on the stage of La Comédie Française. Since then, he has been performing in the entire world: Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, Kennedy Center, Vancouver Recital Society, Palau de la Musica in Barcelona, Paris and Berlin Philharmonics, Bozar Brussels…

In 2018, he created his own ensemble Jupiter. Their multi-award-winning first disc devoted to Vivaldi was released by Alpha in 2019. The discography continues for Erato/Warner Classics with an "Amazone" disc in 2021, a Franco-Italian recital programme with Lea Desandre, and a "Handel - Eternal Heaven" disc in 2022, with Lea Desandre and Iestyn Davies. Jupiter has already been programmed in the greatest concert halls in Europe and the United States.

Previously, Thomas Dunford received numerous awards for his solo discs: Lacrimae, Labirinto d'Amoreen, and solo Bach Suites in 2018. In 2023, he released a new album "Idylle" with mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre, as well as a 5-track EP mixing original compositions but also covers, including the Beatles.

Thomas Dunford is fond of many musical genres, particularly jazz, and has been working in chamber music projects with Paul Agnew, Leonardo García Alarcón, Keyvan Chemirani, William Christie, Jonathan Cohen, Iestyn Davies, Bobby McFerrin, Anne-Sophie von Otter, Jean Rondeau…

Théotime Langlois de Swarte: Violin

Violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte is rapidly emerging as a much sought-after violin soloist (on both baroque and modern instruments), chamber musician, recitalist, and conductor. He became a regular member of Les Arts Florissants while still a student at the Paris Conservatory.  He has since appeared as soloist with the ensemble, and will perform Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” with them across North America in spring and fall, 2025.  He has also appeared in recital with William Christie, including a 2021 recording of sonatas by Leclair and Senaille (“Generations” on harmonia mundi).  

As co-founder - with harpsichordist Justin Taylor and violinist Sophie de Bardonnèche - of the baroque ensemble Le Consort, de Swarte can be heard on international stages and on numerous recordings including “Specchio Veneziano”, “Opus 1”, and “Philarmonica”, all on Alpha Classics. 

Other recital collaborators include harpsichordist Justin Taylor and lute player Thomas Dunford, with whom he recorded a much-praised album, “The Mad Lover”.  Another notable recording, “A Concert at the Time of Proust”, was made on the newly-restored Davidoff Stradivarius at the Philharmonie de Paris Museum.   His most recent recording – “Antonio Vivaldi Concerti per una vita” (harmonia mundi) – has garnered wide acclaim, and early 2025 marks the release of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the work’s publication. 

Alongside his instrumental work, de Swarte is emerging as a conductor.  In 2023 he led performances at l’Opera Comique of Lully’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme and Gretry’s Zemire et Azor.  He returns to l’Opera Comique to lead Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride in November, 2025.