On 7 September Naomi Woo and the Philharmonia present Oliver Leith: Written in Swamp and Gold, an orchestral portrait specially curated by the composer for Bold Tendencies in south London. Alongside three works by Leith the programme also includes Charles Ives’ The Housatonic at Stockbridge and the first movement of Schubert’s Symphony No.4 in C minor, the “Tragic”.
It opens with the first London performance of Cartoon Sun (2023). The 14-minute work is inspired by bells in their numerous forms, making use of pitched and unpitched varieties in varied sizes and shapes – church bells, cowbells, tubular bells (including one dipped in a bucket of water) and sleigh bells.
The performance was also incorporate the pealing of bells of three churches around Bold Tendencies in Peckham. Beginning with a ‘Bell cannon fantasy’, the piece moves from quiet solemnity into blazing, technicolour radiance, closing with ‘a wink from the sun’, as Leith puts it. It was premiered by Thomas Adès and the Hallé Orchestra in April 2024 at Bridgewater Hall.
The concert closes with Leith’s Pearly, woody, goldy, bloody, or, Abundance (2022). “The titles’ format”, Leith says “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. He continues,
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.
Leith 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.
The programme also includes Leith’s Honey Siren for strings, winner of the 2020 Ivors Composer Award in the Large Ensemble category. The 17-minute piece, cast in three movements, expresses Leith’s fascination with unconventional tunings and evocative sonorities. 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. In May 2024 Honey Siren received its French premiere from Orchestre national d'Auvergne and Jean Déroyer the Festival Musiques Démesurées.
In summer 2023 Bold Tendencies saw a performance of Leith’s good day good day bad day bad day from his longstanding collaborators GBSR Duo, for whom the work was composed in 2018; their recording of it was released through Another Timbre in 2020. The 45-minute work for piano, keyboards, and percussion reflects Leith’s preoccupation with the ordinary and mundane across its eight movements. The pair returned to the work this summer in a late-night concert at Wigmore Hall, following their performance in the premiere of Leith’s Doom and the Dooms with Sean Shibe and 12 Ensemble.