The Australian Chamber Orchestra premiere Jonny Greenwood's Water

The Australian Chamber Orchestra, led from the violin by its artistic director Richard Tognetti, gave the world premiere of Jonny Greenwood's Water at the National Concert Hall in Dublin on 2 October. The commission was first reported last December. London hears it on 4 October, and Australia from late in the month.

Greenwood hopes to catch a couple of the European concerts but not the Australian ones, he told Jacquelin Magnay of The Australian a week before the premiere. I am in the recording studio with Radiohead in a couple of weeks², he said. He had finished the score only about three weeks before that interview, in time for the final rehearsals.

Tognetti asked him to write for the orchestra after it had played one of his film scores, and offered him the players as a laboratory. Water grew out of the three months Greenwood spent with them in Sydney in 2012, staying on after Radiohead's Australian tour. He wrote by day, and the players workshopped what he had written so he could hear it.

He set out to make something Australian, drawing on Clive James and Barry Humphries and visiting the places James wrote about, but it felt forced. A trip to India turned him to the tanpura, the drone instrument that usually sits at the back of an Indian ensemble. He worried about disrespecting the skill it takes, then reasoned that nobody had told Bob Dylan to go to Spain and learn the guitar properly. It sounds amazing, and when you hear the thing that is making the sound you go, 'Is that all, is that all it is?'²

The finished piece is for the orchestra's strings and an upright piano over tanpuras, real and synthesised, with electronics standing in only for the extra instruments. Tognetti remembers an early workshop, when after all Greenwood's talk of huge, wonderful tanpuras a tiny one turned up; an iPhone app stood in later, and the concerts use real ones. Andrew Johnstone, reviewing the Dublin night for The Irish Times, calls the piece ceremonial rather than showy, with an echo of the 1960s Western taste for Ravi Shankar but a lean, level-headed manner of its own.

Tognetti says Steve Reich called the plucked string effect Greenwood uses in it the first fresh approach to pizzicato since Bartók. For classical musicians Radiohead are the band¹, he tells The Arts Desk, for their harmonies, their strangeness and the way they mix forms.

Water: the 2014 performances

Jonny Greenwood and Richard Tognetti on Water, Southbank Centre, London, 4 October 2014· Australian Chamber Orchestrawatch on youtube →

Behind the scenes of the first performances of Water, 2014· ABC Classicwatch on youtube →