On 28 June Ludovic Morlot conducted the BBC Philharmonic in Oliver Leith’s Pearly, goldy, woody, bloody, or, Abundance at Blackpool Winter Gardens as part of THE BLACK LIGHTS – a new festival of contemporary art in the city. The work, recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3, was presented alongside music by Mica Levi, Terry Riley, and John Adams.
The title of the 11-minute piece, Leith notes, “is a nod to those twee eighteenth-century novels that have many titles - 'the plights of x or y’s pitiful life'. The words are materials or means of attaining luxury in some form”, Leith writes, and the work begins with a sense of grandeur: “classical, thick, like marble moulding, beautiful, regal”. This party atmosphere, though, soon begins to dissipate.
I wanted the bones of the piece to sound like the layman's orchestra, to be as close to an impression anyone might do of an orchestra. The instrumental writing is plain: lots of unisons, the only percussion are timpani, the orchestration is stripped back and classical. From there we go elsewhere: it droops and fuzzes.
The piece calls on the musicians to use their voices as well as their instruments, mumbling at various points. “It should sound like a sort of over-mannered and deflated party”, Leith says in the score; by the end it is “slurred, end of night, passing out”. In addition to the orchestral instruments, Pearly features optional parts for a fountain and gun (or guns), which can also be realised through the use of pre-recorded sounds.
The piece has previously appeared with Jack Sheen and the BBC Symphony Orchestra at Maida Vale Studios, and with Naomi Woo and the BBC Philharmonic at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester; in 2024 Woo also conducted the piece with the Philharmonia Orchestra at Bold Tendencies as part of an orchestral portrait programme curated by the composer. It was commissioned by the London Contemporary Music Festival and premiered by Jack Sheen in 2023.