Oliver Leith’s string orchestra work Honey Siren returns to London stages in April 2026 for performances from Figure and 12 Ensemble, on 9 April at Smith Square Hall and 16 April at St Martin-in-the-Fields. The 17-minute piece will appear with Figure, conducted by Frederick Waxman, in a programme mixing baroque and contemporary repertoire, including works by Caroline Shaw, Isabella Gellis, Handel, and Biber.
12 Ensemble, who commissioned and premiered the work in 2019 and are among Leith’s most important collaborators, present it alongside the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis as well as works by Bruckner and Mahler.
Leith writes that Honey Siren should be “dripping, hazy, globular, oozing”. Cast in three movements, it expresses Leith’s fascination with unconventional tunings and evocative sonorities. Its bending, veering pitches, Leith says, “are not notes ‘in-between’ but the same pitches with a curved/sharper edge, like sniffing vinegar or a cannonball on a tight trampoline.”
The work imagines the wailing sirens that pass into and out of earshot in the urban landscape; Leith transforms their see-sawing into melodic figures and textures that are by turns joyful and disconcerting. Twisting pitch and harmony through 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. Honey Siren contains many of the hallmarks of Leith’s writing for strings, which would appear again in his chamber opera Last Days (2022) and will o wisp, co-commissioned by Manchester Collective and the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra in 2022.
‘Full like drips’, the second movement, will tour with Scottish Ensemble as part of their Concerts for a Summer Night series in June 2026. It received its French debut from the Orchestre national d'Auvergne conducted by Jean Déroyer in May 2024 and has also appeared with the Philharmonia Orchestra at Bold Tendencies, conducted by Naomi Woo, as part of an orchestral portrait concert in 2024. In 2020 it received an Ivor Novello award.