Music for These Troubled Times

This program embodies my exploration of the concept of melancholy in music and reflects on the states of our minds in these troubled times. This is the repertoire I gravitated to during all the past years when Ukraine, my motherland, was under attack.

In this program music by English composers like John Bull, William Byrd, John Dowland, and lesser-known pieces written by anonymous English composers of the 16th century provide their reflections on loss and uncertainty. This program includes rarely performed and not yet recorded jewels of English music of the 16th century. My exploration continues with music by Johann Jakob Froberger and Louis Couperin, who further explore the melancholy in their preludes, meditations, tombeau and other similar pieces.

Robert Burton writes in his famous treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621 in London, “many men are melancholy by hearing Music, but it is a pleasing melancholy that it causeth; and therefore [...] it is a most present remedy".

Hence, I have created this programme both for the audience and for me, as a performer, to soothe our sorrows and free our minds.

This programme is accompanied by my comments on the issue of melancholy and my choice of composers and pieces.