Eva Reiter / Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe

Eva Reiter first came into contact with Sainte-Colombe’s compositions as a teenager, which led her to make the decision to devote her professional life to the viola da gamba and to composition. Indeed,  the spirit of Reiter’s music is characterised by an “assemblage of avant-garde provocation and brooding nostalgia” similar to that found in Sainte Colombe’s compositions. 
The musical world of Sainte-Colombe is reflected in Reiter’s multi-movement composition L’étoffe de la mémoire, appearing at times as a distant echo, a delayed reverberation that inevitably brings with it a certain degree of distortion of meaning. The liminal space between early music and a new sound language thus becomes a sort of transitional zone, in which our vision of the present is lost in memory and projected into the history of music.

Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe left an extensive corpus of music for solo viola da gamba in the tradition of the seventeenth century. Towards the end of the century, however, he began to explore the new form of the viol duet. 
The manuscript of the collection of 67 Concerts à deux violes esgales shows a great variety in their writing and considerable virtuosity on the part of both viols which is often particularly marked in the second as opposed to the first viol part, as if it were a kind of added improvisation. This style of writing heightens the contrasts typical of Sainte-Colombe’s style, which mixes simplicity with instrumental flair, lyrical melody with bold modulations. As is often the case in seventeenth-century French music, the titles allude to personages and situations with grace and tenderness, irony and fantasy, and relate, with only few exceptions, to the opening movement of each Concert.