Oliver Leith’s On a horse, on a hill, faraway, through fog and bonfire will premiere with the Consone Quartet at the Spitalfields Festival on 4 July, at St-Mary-le-Bow, London. The 10-minute work was commissioned by Consone Quartet with support from the Borletti-Buitoni Trust. The quartet give a further performance of the piece at Music Paxton on 20 July; it makes its Dutch debut at the Concertgebouw in May 2026.
Leith’s quartet is cast in seven movements: ‘On a horse, on a hill, faraway, through fog and bonfire’ — ‘Flamberge’ — ‘Crowd at the bonfire’ —'Horse breath and muzzle smoke’ — ‘The Departing Glance’ — ‘Moonshadow on Dirge Hil’l — ‘Forever gallop’. Each, Leith suggests, might be a different perspective or angle on the same horseback figure who is the focal point of the piece: “They have a sword, a decorative undulating blade hanging by their side”, Leith writes, “the horse breathing plumes of steam like a cannon after the shot. The horse gallops on the same spot as the moon circles a smooth tall hill, almost cartoon-like.”
The work, whose movements retread and circle this image, is in part a meditation on the Chaconne as form, featuring some of its characteristic tropes – descending drooping laments, elements of repetition – but the piece is “more the pursuit of a feeling…an embrace of intensity and heightenedness”.
The horse is a recurring image in Leith’s output. In Doom and the Dooms, featured at the 2025 Norfolk & Norwich Festival, the imaginary band at the centre of the piece perform ‘My Horse Called Dream’. In 2018 Thomas Adès conducted the premiere of Dream Horse for soprano, bass, and chamber orchestra at Tanglewood, whose text is compiled from the 1923 John Wayne Western musical Riders of Destiny and a list of horses named ‘Dream _____’ that have run in the Grand National.
On a horse, on a hill, faraway, through fog and bonfire is Leith’s third work for string quartet, following The big house, a 25-minute work premiered by Ruisi Quartet in 2021. Like On a horse, it is inspired by pastoral images of a haunting character, namely Simon Marsden’s In Ruins: photographs of grand colonial houses in Ireland fallen into eerie disrepair and dereliction. Leith’s A different ‘Fantasie from Suite no.5 in G minor’ - a 4 ½-minute work based on music by Matthew Locke (c.1621 – 1677) – shares its dark-hued and foreboding character.