Baroque Orchestra B'Rock

Benjamin Britten’s Lachrymae is, as the composer himself says in the work’s subtitle, a series of reflections on a song by John Dowland. Britten takes fragments from Dowland’s lament If My Complaint Could Passions Move from the 1604 collection Lachrimae or Seven Tears and creates a cycle of variations; only at the end of the cycle do the original melodies fully take form. English music by composers such as Dowland and Henry Purcell was a constant source of inspiration for Britten throughout his life. What Britten admired in Dowland was his ability to descend into an abyss of suffering with his music and there, amid the bittersweet melancholy, allow a glimmer of joy to be heard. World-renowned young viola player Dmitry Sinkovsky and B’Rock perform Reflections on a song of Dowland along with Paul Hindemith’s Trauermusik, written in 1936 on the occasion of the death of England’s King George V. Inspired by these musical compositions and connections, the Belgian artist Anouk De Clercq has created a new video installation in which silence and stretched-out time are central themes.

Flagey, Festival van Vlaanderen Brussel, B’Rock