Berlin's DSO play Jonny Greenwood's Popcorn Superhet Receiver

The Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin play Jonny Greenwood's Popcorn Superhet Receiver at the Haus des Rundfunks tonight, with Marzena Diakun conducting. The piece started in the back of a car. In his note on it, Greenwood remembers that as a kid, the family car only ever had the same four cassettes in it¹.

The 2005 work for string orchestra runs to 18 minutes and comes third in a programme of six that opens with Penderecki's Polymorphia and closes with Bryce Dessner's Aheym. The evening is a live edition of Schöne Töne, Sven Helbig's weekly show on radioeins.

The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the CBSO and the BBC Philharmonic have all played it before, and this winter the score is also heard in Copenhagen, in the Royal Danish Ballet's Am I doing it right?, which runs until 6 March.

On long journeys, when the family refused to hear them yet again,

Jonny Greenwood¹

Greenwood writes, I used to listen to the engine noise, and found that if I concentrated hard enough I could hear the music from the cassettes still playing in the background.¹

Schöne Töne Live, Haus des Rundfunks, 21 February 2025