LICHTENBERG FIGURES RELOADED

In 2015, our dear Eva Reiter divided the audience with her hyper-baroque Lichtenberg Figures for solo voice and a large ensemble bathing in an outrageous light show.

And for a Viennese, my god, this type of controversy was never more than ordinary business.
After the concert in Frankfurt one blogger suggested it could be “The Pierrot Lunaire of the 21st century”; another controversially stated “Bankruptcy of Neue Musik”.

And yet today in this doomed year of the Lord 2020, a new chamber version sees the light, visually more sober, but musically much more tense.

Premiered in Vienna on 25 November, The Lichtenberg Figures by Eva Reiter revealed itself as the missing link between Fausto Romitelli and Laurie Anderson. Eva Reiter electronically processes her voice in real time to offer a marvellous spoken word rendition of Ben Lerner’s collection of sonnets which lends its name to the evening, shot through with lyrical musings. 
Reiter, let us not forget, practiced early music a lot, and especially the Elizabethan repertoire.
All of this is set against the background of an orchestration whose electric and envenomed impact brings to mind Romitelli at the height of his musical powers, the man responsible for An Index of Metals.

After a first exposition of the musical material condensed in a Prologue, various episodes enchain rich in contrasts where ambiguity, polysemy, even confusion reign - in line with the extraordinary combinatorial poetry of the American writer Ben Lerner. The Lichtenberg Figures, the unconventional collection of sonnets that Lerner wrote in 2004, are full of rapidly shifting perspectives, from everyday observations that verge on the banal, quotations and scientific considerations to ironic comments.

We will premiere this version for six musicians, with ‘chamber music on speed’ energy, at the TRANSIT festival in Leuven.