Radio 3 listeners vote for Jonny Greenwood's “Popcorn Superhet Receiver”

Jonny Greenwood's “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” has won the BBC Radio 3 Listeners' Award at the British Composer Awards, announced at the Hayward Gallery in London on Friday 24 November. Listeners choose the winner, voting from nine shortlisted works that Radio 3 put on its website in October.

Next door at the Queen Elizabeth Hall that evening, the BBC Concert Orchestra under Robert Ziegler played the piece alongside works by Steve Martland, Joe Duddell and Anne Dudley. Richard Whitehouse, reviewing the concert for Classical Source, calls it a well-deserved revival.

The piece is for string orchestra and runs about 18 to 20 minutes. It was the first Greenwood wrote for the BBC Concert Orchestra, which made him its composer in residence in 2004, and Ziegler conducted its premiere at LSO St Luke's in London on 23 April 2005.

It grew out of radio static and the long, dissonant chords of Penderecki's “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima”. Greenwood's own note goes back further, to car journeys as a child, listening to the drone of the engine and straining to hear the cassette still playing underneath it.