Euchar Gravina: Dwawar ("ħsejjes iduru, iduru")

- from “Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten” (BWV 202)

Every transcription is a crossing. Weltliche tries to cross five of Johann Sebastian Bach’s secular cantatas, attempting to come out lighter and transfigured.

Note by Daniele Ghisi

Throughout the piece the cello plays against a long, held chord which I recorded on an old harmonium that resides in the garage of my girlfriend’s mother in Aberdeen. There’s something about that instrument, that garage, that day – there’s a stillness in that room, you can hear yourself. As I sat there listening to the pedals pushing air through the instrument my mind drifted to other places, other rooms …

Note by David Fennessy

-  from “Jede Woge meiner Wellen” (BWV 206) 

Every transcription is a crossing. Weltliche tries to cross five of Johann Sebastian Bach’s secular cantatas, attempting to come out lighter and transfigured. 

Note by Daniele Ghisi  

One and the Other was commissioned by Karin Hellqvist, the Swedish violinist, researcher and educator.

The first two parts of the work provide templates for navigating and evolving a performance practice derived from Karin’s body of knowledge, which we imagined as a figure of eight loop travelling between past, present and future. In each present moment, elements of the past have the potential to slip out and speak, carried by the momentum generated by repeated motions and recurrences in form; whilst the future is also always threaded into the work through elements of indeterminacy. This relationship between possession by the past and the futurity of invention is grounded in the violinist’s body, which is the sliding ‘knot’ in the infinite twist of the music.

Read a longer programme note by Karin Hellqvist

Note by Liza Lim

East Broadway is a work for toy piano with boombox in one movement. The toy piano is juxtaposed with a tape reminiscent of a malfunctioning 1980s ‘boombox’ conjuring both nostalgia and humor. The composer uses the toy piano as a loud percussion instrument with the boombox bringing the energy of rock. The boombox part is on prerecorded tape and is coordinated with the written music by means of a click track which the performer listens to through headphones.

Note by Julia Wolfe

In March 2020, I found myself at Snape Maltings to collaborate with soprano Juliet Fraser in the filming of an audio-video installation. The experimental project involved Juliet singing along to tracing and transforming recordings of music. On the day that the news of lockdown arrived, she’d been tracing the voices of two brothers who were singing Saqartvelo Lamazo, a traditional song about the beauty of Georgia. It’s an emotional song and an emotional recording – the brothers are singing together after not seeing each other for two years. In tribute to that moment in time this piece is inspired by those experiments. This is a piece about longing to reconnect with others and about the experience of time holding still, endless hours without signposts.

Note by Cassandra Miller

The music for each of the three instruments in this piece has been statistically derived from the corresponding parts of the following three piano trios:

Muzio Clementi La Chasse in C major
Robert Schumann First Movement from Trio No 2 in F major
Maurice Ravel First Movement from Trio in A minor

The pieces begin simultaneously and, being of different lengths, end 40 seconds apart in the above order.

The statistical process involves the independent spiralic movement of the three instruments within a triangle, symbolising the three composers at its apices; the closer an instrument is to an apex, the more of that composer's work is probabilistically present in the resulting piece. At the start, all three instruments are at the triangle's centre (33% of each composer's work); the three spiral paths at once set off in different directions, 120 degrees apart. In the course of time, the three instruments wind outwards, bringing out the three composers ever more clearly. At the same time the instruments gradually catch up with each other, joining forces at the Clementi apex, just as that piece is ending. They move on, passing Schumann at the final cadence, with only Ravel left to finish with.

Read a longer programme note

Note by Clarence Barlow

Movment I
Movment II

Dwawar ('dwah-wahr', roughly translated as 'spinnings' or 'revolutions') is a work that circles around familiar and sentimental sounds with a subtle, personal resonance.

Rooted in a recent obsession with using found sounds or existing music as a starting point for a new piece – from weathered records to recordings of unpolished performances – here I draw on what have so deeply shaped the way I listen and write music from early on: amateur church choirs, scratch orchestras, guitars, bells, hymns, all carrying a sense of intimacy.

More broadly, these are also inherited sounds, passed down through generations and museum-like in that, although routinely made live, they also belong to the past. They carry a soft personal hüzün (in Orhan Pamuk’s sense): a quiet, shared melancholy bound up with memory, decay and persistence, a way of finding beauty not despite agedness, but through it. These sounds and music never stayed with me as fixed notes or harmonies, but as music-performed, shaped by imperfection and my own inflections over time. They sit somewhere between remembering and (re)inventing.

In Dwawar, that in-between quality is set in a repeatedly unfolding motion, spinning and blurring like a turntable alongside live music. It’s closer to sitting in a salon or a living room, at the piano, playing along with the radio or a half-remembered tune. It isn’t an act of restoration but of playful, affectionate recasting and animation for one’s own amusement.

The recordings I worked with for this piece date from the early 1930s and form part of Andrew Alamango Collection of Malta’s Lost Voices, courtesy of Filfla Records, the oldest surviving compendium of music recordings from my native country. Recently rediscovered, these fragile tracks are being archived by the Magna Żmien Foundation , and the excerpts used here have not yet been republished.

Note by Euchar Gravina

Artist Biographies

David Alberman

violin

David Alberman was Principal Second Violin in the LSO from 1998–2023. Born in London, he received his LRAM diploma from the Royal Academy of Music at 16. After playing with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and the LSO, he became a Concertmaster of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. A long-standing interest in contemporary music led him in 1986 to join the internationally renowned Arditti Quartet, with whom he took part in the world premieres of more than 200 works, and made a number of recordings which won prizes internationally.

David enjoys coaching, has appeared as Guest Concertmaster for the LSO, London Philharmonic, BBC Symphony, BBC Scottish Symphony, Scottish Chamber and Bergen Philharmonic Orchestras and the Bayrischer Rundfunkorchester, and as soloist with the Orchestre de Lille, BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra in Vienna, among others.

Chihiro Ono

viola

Born in Chiba, Japan, Chihiro Ono is a London-based Japanese sound artist and violinist specialising in chamber music, experimental music and sound art. She has performed at major festivals and venues across the UK and worldwide and regularly works with esteemed experimental and classical ensembles including Ensemble Modern, Apartment House, CHROMA, London Mozart Players, Tokyo Symphony Orchestra and more.

Colin Alexander

cello

Colin Alexander is a cellist and composer working across a range of disciplines and traditions. Whilst collaborating with artists such as Kit Downes, Héloïse Werner, Abel Selaocoe, Max Baillie, Alice Zawadzki, Sean Shibe and Misha Mullov-Abbado, Colin also performs with a variety of ensembles such as 12 Ensemble, Phaedra Ensemble and United Strings of Europe.

Mark Knoop

piano

An intrepid explorer of music of all ages, pianist and conductor Mark Knoop is known for his versatile technique and virtuosity. While focusing on the work of living composers, his individual interpretations of standard and 20th-century repertoire have drawn praise. In addition to solo performances, he regularly appears with ensembles Plus-Minus and Apartment House and as duo partner with Juliet Fraser (soprano).

He has commissioned and premiered countless new works and worked with many respected composers including Joanna Bailie, Bernhard Lang, Jennifer Walshe, Matthew Shlomowitz, Steven Kazuo Takasugi, Øyvind Torvund and Akiko Ushijima. His recordings of music by John Cage (Wergo and Another Timbre), Morton Feldman (Another Timbre and all that dust), and Bryn Harrison (Another Timbre) have been lauded.

Mark performs regularly throughout Europe, the United Kingdom and Australia and has played in New Zealand, South Korea, Mongolia, United States of America, Canada and at festivals including Borealis (Bergen), Donaueschinger Musiktage, Huddersfield, Klangspuren (Schwaz), MaerzMusik (Berlin), Musiikin Aika (Viitasaari, Finland), Spor (Århus), Transit (Leuven), Ukho Music (Kiev), and Ultima (Oslo). He is co-director of all that dust, an independent record label for new music.