Euchar Gravina: ħsejjes iduru, iduru | sounds spinning, spinning

Daniele Ghisi’s Weltliche crosses Bach’s secular cantatas, transfiguring their worldly origins into something transcendent. Clarence Barlow turns to music by Clementi, Schumann, and Ravel in 1981, as familiar themes are refracted through intricate mathematical structures to create a pulsing piece that propels historical fragments into a new work.

Tapping into the living past of folk traditions, Cassandra Miller’s Daylonging, Slacktide absorbs the voices of a Georgian song, whilst the rhythms and gestures of Swedish polskas are embodied in Liza Lim’s One and the Other. Nostalgia becomes a central and playful character in Julia Wolfe’s East Broadway, and takes a more pensive and personal tone in David Fennessy’s The Room is the Resonator.

The concert finishes with Euchar Gravina’s new work which draws on recently rediscovered 1930s recordings of music and variety sketches, some of the earliest made in Malta. These weathered artefacts – with all their imperfections, quirks and incidental details – become material in transformation, their spinning, whirling human intricacies shaping sound in the present.