On 10 January Naomi Woo conducts Oliver Leith’s Pearly, goldy, woody, bloody, or, Abundance with the BBC Philharmonic and students from the Royal Northern College of Music as part of the RNCM’s 2025 Strings Festival.
The title of the 11-minute work, 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”; the piece is suffused with a party atmosphere, albeit a deflated one.
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”. It was commissioned by the London Contemporary Music Festival and premiered by Jack Sheen.
Woo previously conducted the piece in September 2024 at Bold Tendencies for Leith-curated an orchestral portrait concert, also featuring Cartoon Sun and Honey Siren, performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra. With Jack Sheen in September 2025 she conducted the celebrated premiere of Leith’s Garland at Bold Tendencies, an hour-long orchestral and choral processional that is among his largest-scale statements to date.
Naomi Woo, alongside Jack Sheen, returns to Leith’s music in December 2025 at the Royal Opera, where they share the 16-performance revival run of Leith’s debut chamber opera Last Days at the Linbury Theatre. They are joined for the performances, starting on 5 December, by 12 Ensemble and GBSR Duo, all of whom premiered the work in 2022. Joining many of the work’s original cast from 2022 will be actor Jake Dunn in the non-singing lead role of Blake, making his West End debut.