On 3 May GBSR Duo present the Scottish debut of Oliver Leith’s good day good day bad day bad day at the BBC’s Tectonics Festival in Glasgow. The 45-minute work for piano, keyboards, and percussion was composed for George Barton and Siwan Rhys in 2018, and since its debut at St. John’s Smith Square has appeared at Bold Tendencies and Wigmore Hall, with the world premiere recording of the piece released through Another Timbre in 2020.
The eight-movement piece reflects Leith’s preoccupation with the ordinary and mundane. The recursive music summons the rituals and repetitions of everyday life, as well as obsessional and compulsive patterns of thought and action. These repetitions can prove disconcertingly uncanny, reassuringly trance-like, and quietly joyful. As in Leith’s chamber opera Last Days, in which GBSR Duo performed alongside 12 Ensemble, everyday objects like wine bottles and keys contribute to the musical textures.
“I started to think about this piece after conversations with people close to me”, Leith writes, “and although it is not biographical, it is made for them and from their experiences of the violent, loving, contradictory, mundane, ceremonious, stupid, unnerving, serious, frightening, illogical, comforting, nullifying thoughts that are fought in our heads.”
There are moments of unexpected grandeur alongside sheer banality, yet somehow the mixture is curiously addictive.
The Guardian (Andrew Clements) 15 October 2020
Deadpan, subversive, quietly anarchic, disarmingly heart-sore and sweet-sour music that makes masterful use of space and placement and sparse forces and really deft repetition [...] there is great style and finesse in what Leith is doing. [...] I've listened to [good day good day bad day bad day] an awful lot…I am enchanted afresh every single time.
BBC Radio 3 New Music Show (Kate Molleson)
good day commands and deserves repeat listens [...] its runic character is simply engrossing. At the centre of this feeling are GBSR, whose characters are built lovingly into the score. They seem to cherish the score’s intimacy, making it a really heartfelt expression of their sensitivities…a tenderly created and thoughtfully realised gem.
Tempo (Hugh Morris) March 2021
Longstanding Leith collaborators, GBSR Duo will return to his music in June as Bold Tendencies revive the hour-long choral-orchestral epic Garland on 12 and 13 June. Commissioned by Bold Tendencies and the Oliver Leith Commissioning Circle and premiering to acclaim in September 2025, the work is one of Leith’s largest-scale statements to date. A spectacular sequence of sound, music, and singing, Leith imagines “a busy village, observed like an exhibition, tiny repetitive activities everywhere”, the uncanny atmosphere pivoting between “fear and beauty”. Leith discusses Garland in The Times with Richard Morrison here.
It drew together many of Leith’s most important artistic partners, who will be reunited for the repeat performances this summer: 12 Ensemble, EXAUDI, conductors Jack Sheen and Naomi Woo, and soprano Patricia Auchterlonie. They were joined by Musarc and The Bold Chorus, with the piece also featuring choral refrains written by Charlie Fox and costumes designed by Ellen Poppy Hill; Edward the horse will also return.