Jonny Greenwood on NPO Klassiek

Jonny Greenwood talks to NPO Klassiek at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam straight after the Dutch premiere of æþm, his violin concerto. Sitting through it was nerve-racking, waiting for a mistake all the time. On days off with Radiohead in Amsterdam he always came to concerts in this hall, and being on the other side of the platform is very strange.

The title celebrates an orchestra as a living, breathing thing. He likes to know the players' names, which he admits is a little creepy, and wonders what kind of morning each of them had. He is a bit obsessed with string players: someone in their twenties carrying a cello or violin case is far cooler, to him, than someone carrying a guitar. The piece began as Horror Vacui and kept one short phrase, because he wanted to see what would happen if he did what composers are supposed to do and gave nine months to one thing. Penderecki studied electronics and then found he could make the same sounds with an orchestra; Greenwood has laptop treatments in mind instead, and points to Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, which sounds granular and is all acoustic.

He met Penderecki, who wrote in his kitchen from eight till one every morning and could drink far more than Greenwood. Asked how his relationship to music has changed, he calls it a kind of greed. “I'm just panicking a bit that I'm going to run out of time to hear everything.”