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LE RETOUR - THE ETERNAL RETURN
If it is true that the Viennese spirit can be described as an inimitable combination of avant-garde provocation and inconsolable nostalgia, then Eva Reiter is surely the most Viennese of all. Composer, flutist and viola da gamba player, Reiter was raised on a diet of contemporary music by Fausto Romitelli, both psychedelic and thunderous, and awash with electrified sounds. Yet at the same time, she forged a successful career in early music with a particular taste for the English Elizabethan repertoire and its sublime mannerism that never feared the “floods of tears” of which Shakespeare wrote.
Her duo with her colleague from Ictus, cellist Geert De Bièvre, presents the same kind of contradiction, albeit with greater discretion and intimacy. Here Reiter turns to the French baroque music of the 17th century, as made familiar to the general public in the late 1980s by Pascal Quignard’s great novel, The Music Lesson, and by the film that followed, All the World’s Mornings. The hero, Jean de Sainte-Colombe, is a gamba player and composer. His most notable student was Marin Marais, a very characteristic figure of an austere and intransigent artist, whose highest ideal is musical art that serves to express the most unfathomable secrets of the heart (and who is always threatened by compromises that would precipitate decadence).
The ostensible contrast between the two instruments, the modern cello and the viola da gamba, gives energy to the concert. In 1740, the abbot Hubert Le Blanc published a humorous pamphlet with the rather sarcastic title: La Défense de la basse de viole contre les entreprises du violon et les prétentions du violoncello [Defence of the bass of the viola against the enterpises of the violin and the pretentions of the cello]. In truth, the stakes were high – the aesthetic regime of an entire era was in the process of being overturned: the viola da gamba is soft and woody, melancholic and aristocratic whereas the cello is loud and emits more metallic harmonics; it is triumphant and plainly bourgeois.
By feigning to oppose modern and ancient, Berio and Sainte-Colombe, nostalgia and innovation, the cello and the gamba da viola, this concert pays subtle homage to an eternal desire of music, and its most ancient and universal function: the art of the half-said.
CAST
Geert De Bièvre: cello
Eva Reiter: viola da gamba ; concept and dramaturgy
The concert is made in collaboration with Musik i Syd.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
S:t Johanneskyrkan, Rådmansgatan 20, SE-211 46 Malmö, Sverige,Malmö, Sweden
