Jonny Greenwood and Krzysztof Penderecki's record is out on Nonesuch

Nonesuch has released the record Jonny Greenwood made with Krzysztof Penderecki, out in America on 13 March and in Britain a day earlier. It pairs two of Penderecki's early works with the pieces Greenwood wrote in response to them: Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, from 1960, with Popcorn Superhet Receiver, and Polymorphia, written for 48 strings in 1961, with 48 Responses to Polymorphia.

The record grew out of the European Culture Congress in Wrocław last September, where the two men's works were played side by side and where they met and agreed to work together. I didn't expect to meet somebody from pop music who was really quite a normal person⁶, Penderecki says. He is 78, and remembers 9,000 young people filling the hall when 48 Responses was first played, people who had never heard of his music. Greenwood has admired that music for years and often draws on it in his own work, but Penderecki sees no imitation in it. None of what Jonny does is a copy of what I have done. Even his notation is different from mine.⁶

The AUKSO Chamber Orchestra from Poland plays throughout, recorded in Poland in the autumn of 2011. Penderecki conducts his two works and Marek Moś conducts Greenwood's. The New York Times Magazine was there on 12 September, when 48 strings under Moś recorded new versions of both Greenwood pieces and Penderecki dropped by. The same players and conductors bring the programme to the Barbican in London on 22 March, for the Kinoteka Polish film festival.

NPR has streamed the whole record since 5 March. Ben Hogwood gives it three and a half stars in musicOMH, though he finds that four pieces for string orchestra sound alike at one sitting.

Popcorn Superhet Receiver dates from 2005, when Greenwood was composer in residence with the BBC Concert Orchestra, and its music runs all through his score for Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood. It had come out once before, on the small Analekta label late in 2011, a disc Slate says almost nobody noticed. Greenwood is now scoring Anderson's next film, The Master, and was filling a notebook with sketches for it while Radiohead got ready for their American tour.

Penderecki drew parts of Polymorphia from wiring psychiatric patients to encephalogram machines, playing them his Threnody and turning the graphs of their brainwaves into the music. Greenwood's version, as he described it to Tom Service of the Guardian, needed only an oak leaf from his garden. He turned the lines of its veins into musical material, partly as a tribute to Penderecki's love of trees, and lets it run for about 30 seconds of a 20-minute piece. I hope he sees it as a gesture of affection, but it might be one of those things that looks better on paper.⁶

Tracklist