In February 2025 Manchester Collective tour Oliver Leith’s string quartet The big house and Cassandra Miller’s Leaving to the Howard Assembly Room, Royal Northern College of Music, and Southbank Centre. Both works appear as part of their Hidden Mechanisms programme, led by their Co-Artistic Director Rakhi Singh.
The big house is cast in eight movements and lasts 25 minutes. It is inspired by photographer Simon Marsden’s In Ruins, which brings together images of grand colonial houses in Ireland which have since fallen into eerie disrepair and dereliction, framed by lines from Yeats’ haunting poem The Curse of Cromwell – “toothy relics”, as Kate Molleson puts it, “of famine, civil war, emigration, and shifting cultural power…their walls slouching under lichen and ivy”. She continues,
The movement titles in Big House are not literal…The music takes on the character of those slumping, once-grand buildings. Leith’s Blue Bottles buzz their last…Sunshine Choir is all shafts of light through mucky windows, dust molecules riding the drafts…In Cornicing, egg-and-dart plaster melts and slithers. In Chapel Organ, the bellows wheeze away resolutely. Pomegranates are ripe, squirty and potent. Fish eggs have a squeak and a sheen.
The big house was premiered by Ruisi Quartet at Wigmore Hall in 2021, and was the centrepiece of the quartet’s eponymous 2023 debut album, alongside 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).
Manchester Collective co-commissioned and premiered Leith’s will o wisp – a haunting, folk-inflected 19-minute for string orchestra – in December 2022; earlier that year they toured the middle movement of Leith’s Honey Siren.
Miller’s Leaving is a 6-minute work from 2011. It is a response to a 2005 composition of the same title by Zav RT, taking a recording of the piece and deriving its material from it, and joining it with what Miller calls “the meanderings and wanderings” of Canadian fiddle player Oliver Schroer, who passed away in 2008. It is a celebration of their friendship and musical collaborations, through which they continually rediscover and return to each other. Quatuor Bozzini’s recording of it was released on Another Timbre in 2018. Miller discusses the piece with Stéphanie Bozzini here.
The piece is also dedicated to Miller’s mother. “There is a large and important piece of me that is always missing when we are apart”, Miller writes. “Living in different cities as we do is an unsolvable heartache - what to do about it but to write music?”