It can really feel straightforward to forged a swift judgment on the composer Oliver Leith. First, there are his titles, resembling “Uh huh, Yeah,” “Bendy Broken Telemann No.3,” and “yhyhyhyhyh.” Then, there’s the inspiration for his sounds, through which on a regular basis objects like glass bottles and cereal bowls are thought-about intensely, changing into bizarre devices themselves.
But if Leith appears flippant, he rejects that characterization totally.
“People talk about irony in society all the time now, and I find that a little dull,” Leith mentioned in an interview. “It’s a very British way of looking at things. Like, ‘Oh, are you being serious or are you not?’ No; I am deadly serious when I’m doing these things. I’m just chasing this strange feeling.”
Leith’s means of speaking about music is so much like his precise music: blurry and discursive, but in addition exactly evocative. That unusual feeling he’s chasing, for instance, is one he in comparison with being at a wake, the place “outward joy and outward sadness” are attainable on the identical time.
Listen to his works, and also you’ll see what he means. Take his opera “Last Days,” which receives its U.S. premiere on Feb. 6 in Los Angeles as a part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella collection. (The opera’s first recording may also be launched on the Platoon label on April 5.) It is tailored from Gus Van Sant’s 2005 movie of the identical identify, which fictionalizes the ultimate days of Kurt Cobain.
During its premiere run in London, in 2022, the opera garnered lots of consideration based mostly on the belief that it was a biographical work. “It’s so not about Kurt Cobain,” Leith mentioned. “It couldn’t have more distance from its subjects than it has, I think.”
Instead, Leith and the opera’s librettist, Matt Copson, wished to put in writing archetypes — like characters in a style movie, through which the magic lies in how far they stray from their inventory expectations. Formally, “Last Days” additionally mirrors “the way that oral histories or myths are transmitted, where every iteration keeps the soul of a story, but changes skin,” mentioned Caroline Polachek, who sings a prerecorded aria within the present.
Before touchdown on “Last Days” as a venture, Leith mentioned, he wished to put in writing an opera concerning the banal, “about somebody putting their bins out.”
“Oliver walks this impossibly contemporary tightrope,” Polachek mentioned, “between romanticism and being quite provocatively trollish.”
Like the movie, the opera “Last Days” is constructed across the protagonist Blake and depicts the aimless days main as much as his suicide, over a length of about 90 minutes. “There’s many deaths in opera, but this is a particularly powerful one, because you’re not watching it happen,” mentioned the composer Thomas Adès, who will conduct the work in Los Angeles. “I felt like you almost go through it with him. It’s very eerie.”
For Adès, “Last Days” exhibits “the inner psychology of a moment,” although Leith mentioned that as a personality, Blake is intentionally held at arm’s size changing into “a blank cloth to be projected on the whole way through.” Silent, besides for infrequent mumbled phrases, Blake drifts via the opera bereft of company: as an idol for followers, as a money cow for the trade, whilst an on a regular basis individual caught up within the each day rigmarole of Mormons and DHL supply drivers pestering him at his door.
But the animating stress of “Last Days” is between its visible and auditory environments, and the sound world Leith builds places audiences very a lot amongst Blake’s blurry ideas. “You hear what he hears, in a way,” mentioned Adès, pointing to a scene through which Blake solutions a telephone name from his supervisor: Surtitles define the one-sided dialog, but all that the viewers hears is the gabbling voice of a cattle auctioneer.
Leith’s rating builds its world by taking part in with style and expectation. Everything can sing, to various extents: In the pit, the ensemble sings or whistles; glass bottles are exactly tuned; the pouring of cereal right into a bowl turns into a crunchy texture. And all of the constituent components are chosen with view of making a heightened sense of the on a regular basis.
The physicality of Leith’s music is linked to his formative experiences taking part in with recorded music as a baby. With information, he mentioned, “there’s a more physical relationship with sound. Slowing things down, speeding things up; I think that relates to every piece I’ve ever made.”
Leith, who was born in 1990, grew up in London, and as a youngster performed the guitar in bands with mates. (He listened to grunge, although direct references to that truth are resisted in “Last Days”). Then, he merely stopped.
“The great mystery of my life is that I have no idea what the thing was, but suddenly I couldn’t do it anymore,” Leith mentioned. There was one thing instructive in that shift, too. “I don’t want to be seen,” he added. “I don’t mind it in the peripheral, but from the front? It’s terrible.”
Yet Leith’s thoughts remained within the band sound, and in electronically enhanced sound extra typically. He has launched digital music on Matthew Herbert’s label Accidental Records, and mentioned, “In a different world I might have been a producer.”
Where different composers may think exactly notated, microtuned glissandos to point a sagging gesture, in Leith’s music, the identical impact is perhaps realized higher by imagining the turning of a dial on an amp. “There’s a carefully-calibrated fuzziness in multiple musical parameters at once,” George Barton, one half of the GBSR Duo, which can carry out in “Last Days,” mentioned in an e-mail.
“What I’m really doing,” Leith mentioned, “is putting chorus on things.”
That considering is mirrored within the language he makes use of on the web page of a rating, too. “You don’t see many — or in fact any — ‘adagios’ or ‘allegros’ written in his scores,” mentioned Siwan Rhys, the opposite member of the GBSR Duo. “Last Days” consists of instructions like “deflated,” “sloppy” and “Big (Puccini).” Among Rhys’s favourite solutions in his “good day good day bad day bad day” are “fluffy and imagine spinning slowly like Alice down the hole,” and “nervous nervous feeling sick — this is the big bloody show.”
“His descriptions,” she added, “are instead uniquely and precisely his, which I think makes playing his music feel very personal.”
A second the place all these concepts fuse is in “Non Voglio Mai Vedere Il Sole Tramontare,” the aria from “Last Days.” During a uncommon second through which sight and sound align, Blake sobs whereas listening to a extremely charged recording of his favourite opera singer. What we hear is a closely warped, Verismo pastiche, that includes Polachek singing poetic Italian over plush strings.
“The aria started by Oliver texting me what my highest note is,” Polachek mentioned. It was a excessive F sharp, a semitone larger than the very best be aware in Mozart’s well-known “Queen of the night” aria. “He said, ‘fantastic, be right back.’”
What he wrote is music that wells up for about 90 seconds, earlier than seemingly bottled-up emotion bursts out as Polachek whooshes up the octave to the be aware.
“I’m very interested,” Leith mentioned, “in the idea of being overwhelmed.”
