Jonny Greenwood on BBC Radio 3

Jonny Greenwood's first commission as composer in residence with the BBC Concert Orchestra, Popcorn Superhet Receiver, has its premiere at LSO St Luke's, and Mixing It talks to him and the conductor Robert Ziegler afterwards. A superhet is a kind of radio, and the title came off a list of radio words he collected; the piece plays with white noise and things obscured, then slowly revealed. In one interlude many of the string players pluck with plectrums, as if their instruments were ukuleles, which Ziegler had never conducted before. Much of the piece is long held notes, which go back to Greenwood's own viola recordings. He can barely play the viola in tune, so he would find one note, check it on a tuner and stay there, layering himself up.

He had once been told that everything with an orchestra goes through the conductor; these players came to him with ideas and explanations of their own. Hearing it in the hall, the tension when the players start talking and shouting excited him. They read out junk emails, scraps of newspapers and financial reports, and a website he found predicting who the next Pope would be and how long he would last.