On 4 November Figure Ensemble and Frederick Waxman premiere an expanded string ensemble version of Oliver Leith’s A different ‘Fantasie from Suite no.5 in G minor’ at LSO St. Luke’s. This arrangement for larger forces, building on its previous incarnation as a work for string quartet, was commissioned by Figure Ensemble.
The 4 ¼-minute piece is a reimagining of music by Matthew Locke, the English baroque composer who created numerous achingly expressive suites for consorts of viols and recorders. Leith was drawn to the relatively blank character of Locke’s notation, seeing an alchemical magic in sculpting these sounds out of silence, and prompting fundamental questions of his own: “what are phrases? What are dynamics? Imagine playing this on an ancient instrument with no dynamic capabilities – how might new shapes emerge?” Turning its phrases over and over, Leith’s ‘different’ Fantasie emerged. Its essential gestures are retained, but its details slip and slither, coloured by microtonal tunings and the twisting of pitch and harmony to discover new textures inside the music.
The original version of the piece was premiered by Ruisi Quartet at Wigmore Hall in 2021, and appeared alongside Leith’s first string quartet The big house – a work of eerie dereliction inspired by photographer Simon Marsden’s In Ruins, images of grand colonial houses in Ireland which fallen into disrepair – on the group’s eponymous debut album in 2023.
This expanded arrangement complements Leith’s other recent works for strings: will o wisp – a haunting, folk-inflected 19-minute piece in four movements – commissioned by Manchester Collective and Norwegian Chamber Orchestra and Honey Siren, an Ivor-award winning 17-minute piece written for Leith’s longstanding collaborators 12 Ensemble in 2019 (and performed by Figure Ensemble in 2026).
Cast in three movements, Honey Siren expresses Leith’s fascination with unconventional tunings and evocative sonorities: using a carefully calibrated microtonal blur, it is music both entrancing and enticing as well as sticky and claustrophobic. As with many of Leith’s works, it explores the boundary of quotidian non-musical and musical sound.