Euchar Gravina: Dwawar (“ħsejjes iduru, iduru”)

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 Recorded live at LSO St Luke's on Saturday 21 February 2026 David Alberman violin Chihiro Ono viola Colin Alexander cello Mark Knoop piano #LondonSymphonyOrchestra #ContemporaryMusic #ChamberMusic ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Subscribe to the LSO's channel: http://bit.ly/LSOsubscribe Subscribe to LSO newsletter: https://smarturl.it/lsonewsletter Follow the LSO on: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/londonsymphonyorchestra Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/londonsymphonyorchestra TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@londonsymphonyorchestra Twitter: https://twitter.com/londonsymphony LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/london-symphony-orchestra/ Website: https://lso.co.uk/ Apple Music: http://geni.us/yH0sXY Spotify: http://spoti.fi/291cCk0 LSO Live: https://lsolive.lso.co.uk/