Between contemporary and Renaissance repertoires, the concert performed by this trio is an ode to the “black bile” — the melancholy pitch, the saturnine liqueur…
A clear voice without vibrato, an acoustic or electric guitar, Eva Reiter’s subtle way of playing the viola da gamba form a patchwork of tormented and delightful miniatures: short bitter-sweet melodies, Purcell-style ostinati (with the music of Filidei, for example), pop songs that have been slowed down a hundred times, nocturnal confidences …When time fragments and the past wavers…

Imagine all the things that could be dreamed up when time no longer plays a role? That is a naïve question, but a very tempting one for just a moment. Music could eternally sway to and fro, there would be no yesterday, today or tomorrow, we wouldn’t need to worry about leaps in time between the Renaissance and the present time or between the Baroque and the Romantic periods, the melancholic music of a John Dowland (1563-1626) would stand directly next to Bernhard Ganders (*1969) „Darkness awaits us“, Thomas Campian (1567-1622) next to Burkhard Stangl’s (*1960) lucid Dowland adaptations, Franceco Filidei’s (*1973) gestural music next to “What if a day by Mr. Dowland”.

Acedia: sadness, depression. Guillaume d’Auvergne describes a person afflicted with acedia as being “sick of God”. This tædium dei, this disgust of God, represents the greatest of sins. According to Giorgio Agamben, medieval acedia can take on the following forms:

In the first place there is malitia (malice, ill will), the ambiguous and unstoppable love-hate for good in itself, and rancor (resentment), the revolt of the bad conscience against those who exhort it to good; pusillanimitas, the ‘small soul’ and the scruple that withdraws crestfallen before the difficulty and the effort of spiritual existence; desperatio, the dark and presumptuous certainty of being already condemned beforehand and the complacent sinking into one’s own destruction, as if nothing, least of all divine grace, could provide salvation; torpor, the obtuse and somnolent stupor that paralyzes any gesture that might heal us;

and finally, evagatio mentis (wandering of the mind), the flight of the will before itself and the restless hastening from fantasy to fantasy. The latter manifests itself in verbositas (garrulity), the proliferation of vain and tedious speech; curiositas, the insatiable desire to see for seeing’s sake that disperses in always new possibilities.
(Giorgio Agamben, Stanze 1977)