For those unaware, melancholy is a recurring theme in literature and music for several centuries. Our days, it is often related to a state of mind close to sadness, or even depression. But in John Dowland’s time, one sought to reach the melancholy state because it allowed one to bring one’s soul closer to the sacred, it was almost a spiritual step, in no way negative.

To achieve this state, music and writing were the best mediums. Melancholy is everywhere in Dowland’s music and lyrics. It is sometimes very dark, sometimes almost joyful, and it rhymes with anguish, anger or even hope.

What strikes us with Dowland is also the timelessness of the feelings he expresses and the themes he addresses: the passing of time, the approach of death, the end of love … so many themes that we find in today’s music in various forms.

This recital proposes to mirror Dowland songs with more recent songs, revisiting all of them sometimes in a pure luth-voice version, sometimes adding an electric guitar, a drum, a flute, or coloring it by modern electronic sounds.

A sound journey and meditation on the theme of melancholy across centuries and genres, from Dowland to Lana del Rey, Johnny Cash or Metallica, from baroque to rock.

Musician Marina Viotti was born in Switzerland, her parents both being musicians, and grew up in France. Curious by nature, she did not only study classical music (flute), but also explored jazz, metal or chanson.

John Dowland - Songs
Neil Young - Old Man
U2 - One
Metallica - Nothing Else Matters
Lana del Rey - Born To Die
Nine Inch Nails / Johnny Cash - Hurt
Björk - Jóga

This wonderfully cultured, heartfelt, impassioned and genuinely creative recording opens on a series of John Dowland tracks, opening on the atmospherically foreboding Mourn, Mourn, Day is with Darkness Fled and also the veritably ethereal Stay Time a While Thy Flying, before we then get a sincerely breathtaking Old Man (Neil Young), then comes the the spiritually embodied Fairwell, Too Fair, a mesmerizing take on One (U2), the beauty of Dear, If You Change, and then we get brought forth a smoothly organic Nothing Else Matters (Metallica).

Along next is a Westernized coupling of both In Darkness Let Me Dwell and Die Not Before Thy Day and they are in turn backed by a quite brilliant reworking of Born To Die (Lana del Rey), a haunting Go Crystal Tears, the album rounding out on a dutifully guttural Hurt (Nine Inch Nails / Johnny Cash), coming to an all-too-soon close on the pure gossamer of Björk’s 1997 gem Jóga and a dreamy Flow My Tears.

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