On one side of the orchestra: a supermarket trolley piled up with domestic castoffs (a drying rack, a lampshade, a Thermos flask, a couple of dustbin lids) and an industrial catering tray suspended from a frame. On the other: a Steinway concert grand piano. Such juxtapositions are typical of Bold Tendencies, the groundbreaking arts organisation based in Peckham Multi-Storey car park, which programmes a wide array of performances in its concrete concert hall a few minutes’ walk from the vivid scruffiness of the south London high street and a busy railway line.
Commissioned by Bold Tendencies, the world premiere of Garland, Oliver Leith’s large-scale “processional work”, fitted right into its world of equivocal, self-conscious semi-gentrification. Leith, the composer of the critically acclaimed Last Days, begins his hour-long piece with hymn-like piano chords and someone whistling a descant. Then the two tubas of an expanded 12 Ensemble entered with a hefty bass pedal, cueing the first of many slow journeys across the stage travelled by a community choir, the Bold Chorus, and professional vocal ensemble Exaudi. Initially they smiled and chattered before standing to join the pseudo-hymn, their sound warm and wholehearted. Later, grim-faced, they trailed thin ropes of bells, blew through straws, spun whirly tubes, and dragged planks of wood and lengths of aluminium tubing. A couple of singers pushed supermarket trolleys full of glass bottles, shaking them as commanded by scores propped on the child seats.
These beguiling sounds counterpointed the often voluptuous tone of 12 Ensemble’s strings – at close quarters and as the procession continued out of sight, behind the audience. One memorable passage felt like being in a bell tower as the changes are rung, the entire concrete structure made wildly, ecstatically resonant. There were also solos from soprano Patricia Auchterlonie (often stunningly controlled crescendos and blistering releases of her laser-like upper register), a dramatised switch of onstage conductors from Jack Sheen to Naomi Woo, and a horse steered reluctantly across the stage. On its second pass, it led off the singers, clattering away as the final chord echoed. Charlie Fox’s text was largely inaudible, its narrative lost. Instead, Garland was an extravagantly immersive staging of sound in motion.
