Euchar Gravina: Once upon a place

Euchar Gravina brings together a programme of contemporary chamber pieces that inhabit, remember or conjure a place of their own, tracing how places are recreated with as music reaches for them.

Some of the works on the programme draw on real locations – Cerrone’s Double Happiness collects sentimental souvenirs from a trip across Italy and Harding’s Aepyornis uses the sounds of Madagascar to transport us to an imagined prehistoric land.

Janulytė ‘s Psalms reflect on LSO St Luke’s own Baroque church history engaging with music of ritual and gathering. That sense of collectivity is then heard in Lussi’s Notre Dame – 15 April 2019, which returns us to the streets of Paris on the night we witnessed the city’s famous monument fall into ruin.

Sabat’s Backyard Summer Patio reminds us of the universal and the unspecified: any patio, any summer, anywhere. Similarly, Lonsdale’s enchanting Breathing Skies and The Distant Bells of Fulfilment, featuring the New London Chamber Choir, opens a window onto something just out of reach.

The concert closes with Gravina’s new work, drawing on a diary of sonic and musical artefacts gathered from Malta. Here memory of place is not fixed, but produced as a ritual being remade, echoing into the unconscious.

Presented by LSO Discovery.

LSO Jerwood Composer+ is generously supported by Jerwood Foundation, with additional support from the Boltini Trust, Hinrichsen Foundation, The Marchus Trust and the Vaughan Williams Foundation.