Oliver Leith

Born in the United Kingdom in 1990, Oliver Leith has developed in London a compositional voice situated between contemporary and electronic music, built on repetition, short motifs, shifts in perception and deliberately spare textures. Trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama from 2009 to 2015 with Julian Philips and Paul Newland, his works quickly circulated within the UK’s new-music scene, with performances at the Barbican, the Royal Festival Hall, Wigmore Hall, Kings Place and Snape Maltings, presented by ensembles such as Apartment House, Plus Minus, Explore Ensemble, EXAUDI, 12 Ensemble and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. In 2019 he was appointed composer-in-residence as a doctoral candidate at the Royal Opera House, a step that accompanied a widening of his work toward the operatic stage. His first opera, Last Days, premiered in 2022 at the Linbury Theatre and takes its starting point from Gus van Sant’s film. His discography notably includes good day good day bad day bad day, Medusa and Balloon, all released in 2020 — recordings that extend an approach in which piano, percussion, strings and voice move through spare, repetitive and deliberately unstable forms.