will o wisp
will o wisp is a 19-minute piece for string ensemble is cast in four movements - ‘boom push fairy spook’; ‘rot spook’; ‘magic’; ‘knot face’. It bears several hallmarks of Leith’s style: gradual and slight alterations in pitch and harmony, using finely-calibrated microtones; monolithic figures that sit atop more gentle textures; slow repeating gestures whose meaning transforms over time. Lower strings imitate alpine horns, and in the final movement a solo violin dances freely over the rest of the ensemble. It was premiered by Manchester Collective in 2022 and appeared with Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, who co-commissioned the piece, in February 2024. In spring 2025 it was choreographed by Melanie Lane for the Southbank Centre and Bridgewater Hall.
Perusal score here.
Honey Siren
Honey Siren is an award-winning 17-minute string piece that blurs the boundary of quotidian non-musical and musical sound. Cast in three movements, it imagines wailing sirens, both joyful and disconcerting by turns. Twisting pitch and harmony through a carefully calibrated microtonal blur, Leith creates music both entrancing and enticing as well as sticky and claustrophobic. It is an apt reflection of Caroline Potter’s description in Tempo of Leith’s music as an “accidental still life” that “makes the everyday strange, and the strange everyday”.
Perusal score here.
Anders Hillborg – Kongsgaard Variations
Hillborg’s Kongsgaard Variations (2021) is a 16-minute work based on his 2006 string quartet. Named for the Californian vintner John Kongsgaard and the Arietta winery, whose bottles quote the theme of the last movement of Beethoven’s final piano sonata. Hillborg writes a meditative set of variations derived from this music, drifting across a panoply of musical styles: Baroque, folk, Renaissance and Romantic. It was premiered by the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra and has been championed with the San Francisco and Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestras by Esa-Pekka Salonen.
Perusal score here.
Tom Coult – O Ecclesia
O Ecclesia is an 8-minute work for solo violin and strings created for Daniel Pioro and the BBC Philharmonic as part of his residency with the orchestra. Based on a chant by Hildegard von Bingen, its material is presented in full, though very freely adapted – stretched, compressed, and multiplied to fit its new clothing. The violinist intones Hildegard’s melody, while the strings provide soft halos of sound to surround its lyrical line. It has appeared at Musikdorf Ernen and at The Bridge Festival, performed by Scottish Ensemble, Ensemble Resonanz, and the Trondheim Soloists, with Jonathan Morton as soloist.
Prelude (after Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe), Coult’s reworking of music by viol player Monsieur de Sainte Colombe for lower strings, has been performed by Australian Chamber Orchestra, Scottish Ensemble, and 12 Ensemble, and will appear again with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in May 2026.
Perusal score here.
Tansy Davies – Monolith: I Extend My Arms
A 17-minute work, commissioned by Britten Pears Arts, Monolith was premiered by the Britten Sinfonia and conductor Sian Edwards at the 2021 Aldeburgh Festival; Davies discusses the piece on The Red House podcast here. It takes its name from a 1930 black-and-white photograph by Claude Cahun.
The piece underlines Davies’ interest in primal, atavistic energies and geology: the piece is built from rock-like strata of canons in the strings, with textures alternately dense and translucent, enhanced and transformed with interjections from bells and bass drum. The composer describes Monolith as “as a cloud-shaped body of rock descending gently and very slowly, like an enormous feather, from sky to earth.” It has also been performed by Ryan Bancroft and BBC National Orchestra of Wales.
Perusal score here.
Suite for String Orchestra
The 15-minute Suite for String Orchestra is cast in four movements and was premiered by the composer. It opens with a lilting Prelude in 5/8 whose patterns shift throughout; it is succeeded by a rambunctious fugue with a rugged folk-like subject in three. The third movement is a limpid intermezzo with a spotlight on a solo violin in its middle section. A scurrying Gigue (presto) serves as finale.
Perusal score here.
Concerto for Violin and String Orchestra
This 13 ½ minute work is cast in three movements and draws extensively on Irish folk melodies. The opening Allegro is a triple-time dance in B minor that gradually drifts away from its opening tonality, before the soloist establishes a new theme in four time. An Andante middle movement features a gently lilting melody for the soloist, with undulating semiquavers underneath, before opening out into a more passionate, expansive sequence with a brief cadenza. The solo violin alone opens the Vivace finale – a jig in 6/8 that starts with quiet staccato triplets. They turn to duplets for a modal A minor interlude, with a steadier, more rugged theme introduced by the cellos, before movement’s opening figure returns with the same excited scurrying.
It received its first public performance from Midori Komachi and the Elgar Sinfonia of London, conducted by Adrian Brown in November 2024. Komachi encountered the manuscript for the piece at the Red House archive in Aldeburgh; she discusses the Concerto in The Strad here.
Perusal score here.