From the Kunstfestspiele Herrenheusen website:

Chains

of poetic associations, bodies as if struck by lightening, sonnets named after an aesthetic physical pattern.

The Austrian composer and singer Eva Reiter was influenced by early music, the polyphonic language of the Renaissance and Baroque and their unmistakable styles, long before she encountered contemporary sound worlds.

In 2015 she and Ictus surprised audiences with her hyper-baroque composition The Lichtenberg Figures, for solo voice and large ensemble, following a popular late-Renaissance format. Eva Reiter evokes a musical universe of rage, anxiety and unrest. The sonic energy of these pieces is raw, stirring and wild, dominated by distorted voices following the urgently driven sonnets of the young American star poet Ben Lerner. Reiter describes her piece as a ‘sonorous psychogram of society’. It was revived in 2020 in a chamber version that is going to receive its German premiere at the KunstFestSpiele.

The work is preceded by two other compositions by Eva Reiter: “Tube Music”, a fantastical journey through a world of fragile breath and aerial sounds made by five giant recorders distributed around the Galerie. In “The Wilderness of Mirrors”, for electric guitar and electronics (2020), Eva Reiter transfers Bach’s solo-violin vocabulary to a present-day musical gesture. ‘As if looking out of a train window, everything up close rushes past in a blur, while gazing into the distance permits calmness, slowness and overview’, says the composer about the piece. The concert is introduced by Salvatore Sciarrino’s “Immagine fenicia” (1996) , a flute solo which gently introduces the listener into the Reiterian world of “Uncanny”.