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Jonny Greenwood's Smear has its premiere at FuseLeeds
first posted on Treefingers by Miro · rewritten for the archive
The London Sinfonietta gave the world premiere of Smear, Jonny Greenwood's piece for two ondes Martenot and ensemble, at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds on Wednesday 3 March. It is his first orchestral commission, and it came from the jazz pianist Django Bates, artistic director of FuseLeeds, a new festival in its first year. Greenwood did not play; the soloists were Valérie Hartmann-Claverie and Bruno Perrault.
The Financial Times named Smear one of the two pieces of the night that stood out, likened it both to a Messiaen-like meditation and to something close to science fiction, and called Greenwood a composer in the making. The Guardian's reviewer thought it ambient and finely textured, with the two ondes at times like birds trying their hand at synthesiser music. Within a week a recording of the premiere, 13 minutes 28 seconds long, was going round among fans.
On Saturday 6 March the Sinfonietta took the programme to the Concertgebouw in Bruges, which co-commissioned it with FuseLeeds, and played Smear again, with music from Bodysong in the second half.
Greenwood also wrote one bar of Bates's “Premature Celebration”, a patchwork of single bars from about 60 colleagues for the saxophonist Evan Parker's 60th birthday, which Parker played in Leeds.
The ondes Martenot is an early electronic instrument, invented by the Frenchman Maurice Martenot in 1928. It has been on the last three Radiohead albums and on Greenwood's Bodysong, and the band have even put Thom Yorke's voice through its speakers. Greenwood tells Dave Simpson of The Guardian that he first heard one at school, when a teacher played him some Messiaen, and did not know what it looked like for years, until he came across one in Paris and bought it there and then. It looks like a tiny piano, and it's similar to the theremin, but more precise.
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It plays one note at a time, by sliding a ring along a string, with a button for the volume. Two together sound amazing, he says, and guitars are no longer enough for him. It is also the swirling voice on the Star Trek theme. He is glad electronics firms want to sell it, because anyone can play it and it deserved the reach of the Stylophone. It just needed a Rolf Harris. Although I'm not quite sure if that's me.
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