Thomas Dunford and Théotime Langlois de Swarte chose their programme title, The Mad Lover, because they liked the sound of it. That tells you everything about the register they're operating in: serious scholarship worn so lightly it looks like mischief. The setup — lute and violin, 17th-century English and Italian repertoire, a square hall with the audience on all four sides — could have produced a reverent, airless evening. Instead, the two walked in already playing, Dunford swinging the neck of his lute over the audience's heads like a showman, Langlois de Swarte's violin tone simultaneously muscular and sweet in a way that sounds contradictory until you hear it. The programming moved from John Eccles to Daniel Purcell to the Matteis father-and-son line — Nicola Matteis Sr's La Folia treatment getting the 'twelve-bar blues of the baroque' framing it deserves — and Dunford's improvisations threaded through the formal pieces like commentary. Some were authentically baroque; others drifted into a modern melancholy; one became Indiana Jones. He was playing the troll, watching for his colleague's reaction. Langlois de Swarte's Fantasia in A minor by Matteis Jr was the evening's clean revelation: a web of seesawing chords the reviewer rightly identifies as encore-ready for any violinist alive. When one of Dunford's lute strings unfurled mid-performance, he worked around it so cleanly the audience barely registered it. That kind of fluency — the ability to absorb a problem and keep the musical argument going — is rarer than virtuosity, and harder to teach. The evening ended with audience participation: harmonies for a Henry Eccles tavern song, then a mystery encore that turned out to be Bach rerouted through the Beatles' Blackbird. The move could have been cloying. It wasn't. The song is too structurally sound to be ruined by its own familiarity, and the context — two early-music specialists closing a baroque festival with it — gave it a dryness that kept it honest. This was the programme's London premiere, four years after the duo recorded it. The recording exists on Harmonia Mundi; the live version added the improvised tangents, the broken string, the audience singing, and the specific pleasure of watching two performers who trust each other completely. The London Festival of Baroque Music is taking a two-year break while Smith Square Hall is refurbished. If this is what the final week looked like, the venue earns its renovation.
