Jonny Greenwood's Violin Concerto has its premiere with the Hallé

The Hallé gave the world premiere of Jonny Greenwood's Violin Concerto, subtitled æþm, at The Bridgewater Hall in Manchester on Thursday 26 February, with Daniel Pioro as soloist. Hugh Tieppo-Brunt conducted, stepping in at the last minute when André de Ridder fell ill. He and Pioro had given the first performance of the concerto's forerunner, Horror vacui, with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales at the 2019 Proms.

Greenwood spent last year on it. I started by rewriting some of it, and ended by rewriting all of it³, he told the Hallé in January. One eight-note phrase is all that survives of Horror vacui, so the old title had to go. The concerto runs 32 minutes, for solo violin and 56 solo strings. I think of it as a piece of music for solo violin, string orchestra, and conductor³, he says, the three as equals. His publisher, Faber Music, gives the subtitle's meaning as the breath of a living creature. Pioro plays it again on 16 May at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, its Dutch premiere.

Some of its sounds come from Isao Tomita, who imitated the orchestra with electronics in the 1970s; Greenwood says he is stealing them back and putting them into strings. Others follow Penderecki, who in the 1960s wrote the electronic sounds of his day for strings. Greenwood once met him and showed him software that turned string recordings into Penderecki-like sounds. He says live players make those colours far more vivid than any speaker, and the risk is the point. I always want to ask: where’s the peril?³

Greenwood, the Hallé's Featured Artist this season, played in the concert too. It opened with Lutosławski's Musique funèbre, and his own Water closed the first half, with Greenwood on one of the tanpuras. After the interval he stood behind the orchestra on electric bass for Reich's Pulse, and the concerto came last.

Rebecca Franks reported in The Times that the audience stood at once, and gave the premiere four stars. Pwyll ap Siôn gave it four for Bachtrack too, finding that its sections fall into place, patchwork as they sometimes seem. In The Guardian, Flora Willson found the concerto oddly formless for all its beautiful moments and Pioro's fearless playing high on the instrument. She and ap Siôn both caught a passing echo of Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending. Willson thought the rest of the programme gripping, and watched Greenwood leave the stage having barely acknowledged the applause.