A voyage into the Levant – Latinitas Nostra, Athens Festival

In 1599, the young Thomas Dallam hurriedly set out on a journey into the unknown, delivering a church organ to the sultan Mehmet III as a gift from Queen Elizabeth I. Like Rimbaud in Ethiopia, many English travellers were destined to meet the Other in the Levant. On the trail of this distant journey, we chose the Lachrimæ collection by that master composer of Elizabethan melancholy, John Dowland, as our “sweet day of return”. On the opposite end is the secular Ottoman music – le dérèglement de tous les sens (“the derangement of all the senses”, in the words of Rimbaud). Leaving from London and headed for Istanbul, East and West are brought together through the accounts of their journeys…