Jonny Greenwood's answer to Penderecki reaches the Barbican

Poland's AUKSO Chamber Orchestra bring Jonny Greenwood and Krzysztof Penderecki's shared programme to the Barbican Hall in London tonight, 22 March. Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima and Polymorphia sit beside Greenwood's Popcorn Superhet Receiver and 48 Responses to Polymorphia, the four works on their Nonesuch record.

Greenwood's 48 Responses to Polymorphia grew out of a single chord. Polymorphia, written in the early 1960s for 48 strings, ends on a C major chord, which Penderecki, speaking to Adam Sweeting of The Arts Desk, calls a solution, or better a catharsis. Greenwood says Penderecki told him he had written the piece backwards from that chord, and played it to him at his house in Poland like someone playing a demo tape, stopping to point out where the violins could not quite be heard.

Greenwood's first plan was 48 very short pieces, each starting on C major. That began to feel like an exercise, so the music became a chorale in the style of Bach, thick with the chord. The Wroclaw festival that first played the programme last September had expected him, he thinks, to remix a Penderecki piece on a laptop.

Greenwood first heard Penderecki's music at college, just before Radiohead signed to EMI, and assumed the sounds were electronic until, as he remembers it, he went to a concert at Drapers' Hall in London in 1993 or 1994 and saw a string orchestra making them. I was thinking I'd been sold a lie, and a room full of strings could do far more than I knew, and far more than recordings let on as well.¹

He has asked on every Radiohead album for an orchestra to come in at the start, and points to “Harry Patch (In Memory Of)”, written for strings and sung live by Thom Yorke with an orchestra. I'm very keen to do some Radiohead stuff that starts on paper, I think that would be really interesting.¹