DRAMATIC flair

French Baroque violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte has released four albums in a little over a year. He shares with Charlotte Gardner the origins of his dream of uncovering the works of long-forgotten composers – and how that project has come to fruition

Violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte performs with harpsichordist William Christie: ‘He’s really inspired by finding all the possibilities we have with only two instruments’

JULIEN BENHAMOU

Well, knock me down with a feather. Back in September 2018 I attended a Paris concert at the Auditorium du Louvre given by lutenist Thomas Dunford’s period group Ensemble Jupiter. I was there to hear a Vivaldi concerto performed by The Strad ’s February 2019 cover star, cellist Bruno Philippe. Yet I also repeatedly found my eyes and ears gravitating towards a slim, black-floppyhaired figure in the violin section. Not because this violinist wasn’t playing like a sensitive ensemble member – indeed, part of the pull was exactly how alive and responsive he was to his fellow musicians. More, it was the degree of serious intensity written all over his face, and the singing personality of his sound.

Onwards to January 2019, and the same thing happened at the Opéra Royal de Versailles as I caught The Beggar’s Opera with Les Arts Florissants. William Christie and his band were on stage rather than in the pit and were clearly having a complete party. Beyond the ever sprightly Christie himself and Dunford again on the lute, the other figure who lodged in my memory was a black-floppy-haired violinist giving it his all.

Fast forward to January 2020, and France’s Les Victoires de la Musique Classique awards announced its first ever Baroque violinist nominee: Théotime Langlois de Swarte (b.1995). In November that year, this same Langlois de Swarte partnered with his long-standing friend and musical collaborator Thomas Dunford to release a knockout debut solo album on Harmonia Mundi, The Mad Lover, centred on two delectable melancholic works by the relatively little-known English Baroque composer John Eccles. In March 2021 came a second album, this time featuring 19th-century repertoire: Proust, le concert retrouvé recreates a 1907 concert devised by Marcel Proust at the Paris Ritz, with Langlois de Swarte now performing Fauré and Hahn on the 1708 ‘Davidoff’ Stradivari – on loan from the Musée de la Musique – and partnered by pianist Tanguy de Williencourt. This Proust album was one of The Strad ’s recommended recordings in July 2021. In the meantime, though, July brought yet another album, Générations, with Langlois de Swarte now back on his 1665 Jacob Stainer violin and in duo with none other than William Christie in violin sonatas by Leclair and a composer I’d never heard of, Jean-Baptiste Senaillé. And yes, you’ve guessed it – my black-floppy-haired violinist and Harmonia Mundi’s stratospherically rising, already-multi-albumed new star are one and the same person.

I only realise the connection midway through our chat about his latest release (the fourth in little over a year), this time an album of Baroque violin concertos. It’s a Zoom interview the 26-year-old does from the home of his parents-in-law as he takes paternity leave following the birth of his first child, a son. ‘I was second violin!’ he laughs of the Versailles show, as suddenly the penny drops. ‘I was imitating seagulls, if you remember, by making slides Everyone was like, “Théotime, just shut up a moment!” because I was playing when it was not my turn. But for William there were no boundaries with that project. He always wants to hear new ideas and have us improvising, so while we started by sounding classically Baroque, by the 40th show it was completely different, with bits of reggae and blues, and for me it was all improvising.’

Their Leclair and Senaillé recording, made over lockdown, was similarly inspiring. ‘When I was a boy, I listened to William’s Rameau recordings very loud in my bedroom – Les sauvages and Les Indes galantes. I was fascinated by his way of conducting Baroque music: really theatrical, and with a lot of power. It’s not “little Baroque music”. And now, when we play together, we could really be the same age. When he first arrived in France he did an enormous amount of harpsichord playing. I think performing duos with me reminds him of that spirit. He’s really inspired by finding all the possibilities we have with only two instruments. For me, variety is the most important thing on an album, and it’s a challenge and a joy when you do a recital just with harpsichord or lute to be constantly finding new colours and emotions. An album is like an opera or a piece of theatre. You need to have your characters, to think about the effect of every piece, and to be able to move the story on.’

Langlois de Swarte with frequent Les Arts Florissants collaborators, Christie and lutenist Thomas Dunford

LES ARTS FLORISSANTS/JBP FILMS

The latest recording – of Leclair, Vivaldi and Locatelli violin concertos – is with the period ensemble Les Ombres, with which Langlois de Swarte has yet another long-standing relationship: around five years ago it was with this group that he got his first precious concerto opportunities, playing Leclair. ‘My [step-]brother is one of the directors, and it was a huge help at the beginning when I wasn’t known as a solo violinist,’ he says with gratitude. ‘And playing with Les Ombres is really free and rich. There’s no conductor, and the direction is really collegial.’

The project has firsts, too. ‘After three duo albums I now need to express myself with more virtuoso music,’ he begins, ‘but also to find music that is yet to be heard. There is so much music, even by Vivaldi, that has remained buried in libraries. Of the two Vivaldi concertos on this recording, while the one in C minor RV201 sounds very recognisably Vivaldi, the other is a mysterious C major one, RV179, which he wrote for the church. It includes a cadenza he wrote especially for one of his favourite students, Anna Maria, which has never previously been recorded. For me, this is a great way to present Vivaldi – as one of the most famous composers in musical history showing a hidden face through this cadenza. Also, the second movement’s ornamentation is written into Anna Maria’s partbook. So while we’re not sure whether it’s Vivaldi’s, it’s still really inspiring to be able to play the same ornamentation that was played at that moment in time.’

Next month brings another significant concerto project, as Langlois de Swarte and Christie team up again to tour and record the Haydn violin concertos. ‘I really can’t wait to do the slow movement of the C major Concerto with him,’ Langlois de Swarte enthuses. ‘For him, the emotional impression of that slow movement, with its long-lined, lonely voice over pizzicato accompaniment, is like a song sung by perhaps the last human voice, just before the end of the world, expressing the beauty of humanity and nature; and that touches me greatly. It’s not just music. For me, it’s music at its greatest.’

‘AT THE AGE OF FOUR I WAS FOND OF ZOR RO AND THE JEDI KNIGHTS, AND I DECIDED THAT WITH A VIOLIN BOW I’D BE LIKE SOME SORT OF JEDI’

With the focus back on Christie, it’s perhaps the moment to explain how on earth this luminary director’s Rameau opera recordings came to be blasting out of Langlois de Swarte’s childhood bedroom in the south of France in the first place. The answer is that his parents are singing teachers, and thus are themselves admirers of these recordings. As for choosing to play the violin aged four: ‘I loved the bows,’ he explains with a laugh. ‘I was fond of Zorro and the Jedi knights, and I decided that with a bow I’d be like some sort of Jedi.’ His sister, who is two years older than him, was learning the harpsichord, the viola da gamba and the piano and eventually he thought it a shame that they couldn’t properly play harpsichord–violin or viola da gamba–violin duos given how much they enjoyed playing violin and piano sonatas together. So, aged nine, five years after beginning the modern violin, he began Baroque violin lessons on a Baroque instrument, alongside his modern studies.

Langlois de Swarte records his most recent album of Leclair, Vivaldi and Locatelli violin concertos with Les Ombres

LES OMBRES

‘I REALISED THAT THIS WAS WHAT I REALLY WANTED TO DO IN MY LIFE – TO FIND FORGOTTEN COMPOSERS, AND TO EXPRESS MYSELF THROUGH THEIR MUSIC’

It wasn’t all violin, though. Until the age of about 14, Langlois de Swarte was also singing in the choir his mother conducted, and this included lots of musical theatre. ‘From Oliver! to Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Two Fiddlers – and I always played the character roles. In The Two Fiddlers I was one of the trolls, which was really fun, and I think that part of the boy I was when I played a troll is still on stage with me now – because we are seen by the audience as well as heard. Music is not fake expression – you feel every expression that you play. But I think the way that you appear on the stage is really important.’

Aged 17, Langlois de Swarte entered the Paris Conservatoire to study modern violin in the class of Michaël Hentz. ‘He studied in St Petersburg and was mentored by Sergiu Celibidache, which was very interesting. I arrived with my technical baggage and my Baroque sound, whereas his Russian school perspective was the opposite of ideas in Baroque music – ideas of a small sound for chamber music at Versailles. Violinists always say that we imitate the voice, and with him I really worked on making a much bigger and thicker sound, building my vibrato, and this in turn extended my colours as a Baroque violinist.’

Lessons with Hentz occupied five, sometimes six, hours each week, encompassing quartet, duo, trio and solo playing, and all of it modern. ‘The concerto I played the most at the Paris Conservatoire was Shostakovich’s First!’ In the background, though, the Baroque was also bubbling away, and increasingly seriously. Most life-changingly, aged 18 he auditioned for Les Arts Florissants, and Christie took a leap of faith. ‘He told me that following my audition the other members of Les Arts Florissants said, “He’s too much of a soloist to play in the group; he won’t fit,”’ explains Langlois de Swarte. ‘To which William responded, “Yeah, maybe, but we should try,” and I adore this way he has of working. When he has a choir, he wants the soloists to sing in it, but with their individual colour still standing out. Likewise, if someone in the second row of the second violins can be heard expressing themselves, he’s very happy because it adds to the collective expression. He doesn’t want to wipe out personalities. He’s not looking for homogeny, and it’s thanks to this attitude that I started with them, because at the beginning I was too soloistic. I played too loud, I didn’t fit. But bit by bit I learnt and in the process discovered a lot of repertoire.’

It was through Les Arts Florissants that Langlois de Swarte realised that, long term, he most wanted to express himself through Baroque music, with one particular performance of Mondonville’s Grands Motets proving to be an especially powerful experience. ‘I just fell in love,’ he remembers. ‘He’s not a famous French composer, but I thought his music was so great – so powerful. And I realised that this was what I really want to do in my life – to find forgotten composers, and to express myself through their music as if it were mine, written yesterday. One of the wonderful things about human beings is that we feel the same emotions as the people painted by Caravaggio, and I was looking at Caravaggio’s Boy with a Basket of Fruit, this Italian teenager, and thinking that perhaps he and I shared the same feeling: of the slightly uncertain future, the heightened emotions, the thought of needing to do something extraordinary. These thoughts made me want to play Mondonville, and to play with Les Arts Florissants.’

Christie kept inviting him back to play. Meanwhile, at the Paris Conservatoire, aged barely 20, Langlois de Swarte also founded his own period band, Le Consort, with harpsichordist Justin Taylor, violinist Sophie de Bardonnèche and viola da gamba player Louise Pierrard. ‘I had two identities,’ he says.

‘I played repertoire such as the Beethoven quartets all week on the modern violin; then at the weekend I played a trio sonata on my Baroque violin in a beautiful small church in another part of France.’

It was in 2017, when he was still only 22, that representatives from Harmonia Mundi attended a duo concert he played with Dunford at the summer festival Christie holds in his gardens in Thiré; and the rest is history. ‘It was like love at first sight with Harmonia Mundi,’ he says. ‘I was not famous as a solo player. I was just playing chamber music. Yet at our first meeting we talked about five albums. The freedom and possibilities they were offering, when they hadn’t known me before but had just heard me in concert, were incredible! For a violinist devoted to uncovering forgotten repertoire, the partnership has carried with it a further benefit. ‘Recording is the easiest way to bring audiences to new repertoire,’ he explains. ‘I was completely obsessed with the John Eccles music on my first programme. Harmonia Mundi agreed to me recording it with Thomas Dunford, but I couldn’t get a concert booking for it in Paris. I was calling people I knew, and they said, “Eccles isn’t famous. I’ll never find an audience for that. You should do Corelli.” Yet after the success of the recording we had many concerts.’ The scenario is similar with the Senaillé and Christie: ‘Senaillé is completely unknown, but now I think we have perhaps twenty Senaillé concerts over three years, and without the confidence of a label like Harmonia Mundi it couldn’t have happened.’ For its part, Harmonia Mundi is also receiving a benefit, because The Mad Lover alone has already notched up more than four million streams across all platforms. This is music to Langlois de Swarte’s ears, too. ‘I don’t know why there’s this perception that Baroque music is really specialised and for educated people. It’s kind of sad, when, for instance, a lot of The Mad Lover’s pieces were originally heard in taverns.’

As for the future, the longer term will see some first steps towards conducting: ‘Not Tchaikovsky symphonies, though. For me, it’s really important to learn how to conduct with my hands, as an extension of leading a concerto from the violin.’ Meanwhile, in the shorter term there’s yet another forthcoming album, this time with his Éluard Trio, a piano trio formed with Paris classmates as a means of continuing to explore the repertoire studied in Hentz’s class. Echoing the concept of the Proust programme, this will imagine a multigenre musical Sunday afternoon at the house of Robert and Clara Schumann. It will also see him reunited with the ‘Davidoff’ Stradivari, rather than his usual Stainer violin on loan from the Jumpstart Foundation, and it turns out that the subject of violins, and specifically Stradivari, is very close to his heart. ‘The “Davidoff” is an absolutely extraordinary violin,’ he begins. Then he outlines what he would really love: ‘I dream of associating a Stradivari with the European Baroque music and language for which it was originally designed. These magnificent instruments are used by great soloists to interpret Bach and Vivaldi, but mostly they find themselves disassociated from their repertoire, preferred for playing 19th-century music. We need to imagine the musical environment of Stradivari and reconstruct it. His contemporary Leclair notably played a Stradivari, for instance. The sequences of resonances using the harmonic series that are specific to the Baroque style are tailor-made for the sonority of instruments made by Stradivari and other Cremonese makers – which resonate sympathetically with this music.’

JEAN-BAPTISTE MILLOT

‘I DON’T KNOW WHY THERE’S THIS PERCEPTION THAT BAROQUE MUSIC IS FOR EDUCATED PEOPLE. IT’S KIND OF SAD’

Ultimately, though, the future is about enjoying where he is. ‘I’m really happy,’ he smiles. ‘This is now the beginning of the life that I wanted to have: doing a lot of recitals, doing concertos and also chamber music, continuing to play in different genres, and all with the supporting pillars of the strong friendships I already have with William Christie, Thomas Dunford and Justin Taylor. We play and experiment together as children play with ideas, just happy to be doing this together. We’re not thinking, “Oh, we’re doing really important stuff with important music.” No. It’s music, and we just need to express ourselves.’