MISWIRED

Program notes

About the Work

MISWIRED is the shortest piece of the evening, about five minutes, and one of its two commissions from the LSO Helen Hamlyn Panufnik Composers’ Scheme. The scheme, which the orchestra devised with Lady Panufnik in memory of her husband, the composer Sir Andrzej Panufnik, takes six composers at the start of their careers each year. Each writes a three-minute piece for the orchestra, guided by the composers Colin Matthews and Christian Mason, and hears it rehearsed in a public workshop. Two of the six are then commissioned to write something longer for a Barbican concert.

Laila Arafah was a member of the 2024/25 group, and was still an undergraduate at the Royal Academy of Music when the commission was announced. The festival at Grafenegg in Austria, which has also invited her, notes that she was nineteen when the orchestra commissioned her. The LSO said at the time that the two chosen composers would either develop their workshop pieces or write something new, and that the results would be tried out with the orchestra before being given in concert at the Barbican in the 2026/27 season. This is that concert.

What to Listen For

Nothing has yet been published about the music itself, and the title, printed in capitals, comes without explanation. What can be said is what Arafah’s own descriptions of her work point to. The LSO’s announcement speaks of her interest in temporality, in in-between states, and in resonance and decay: how a sound hangs in the air and dies. The Grafenegg biography adds fragile systems and forms that arise from interruption and unstable time. Five minutes is not long, and a composer with those concerns is likely to make every gesture count. It may be worth listening less for themes than for what happens to a sound after it has been made.