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Jonny Greenwood/Krzysztof Penderecki on Nonesuch and in the Press

Apr. 26, 2012

Jonny Greenwood/Krzysztof Penderecki on Nonesuch and in the Press

The long-awaited album of string orchestra works by Jonny Greenwood and Krzysztof Penderecki was released by Nonesuch on March 13, featuring performances by the AUKSO Chamber Orchestra led by Penderecki and Marek Mos. The album pairs iconic works of Penderecki, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima and Polymorphia, with the recent Greenwood works, Popcorn Superhet Receiver,and the first recording of 48 Responses to Polymorphia, his homage to the Polish composer.

Greenwood doesn't need any false modesty when it comes to his classical pieces. His 48 Responses isn't just a good piece for a composer who is more used to the studio, it is a dazzlingly imaginative, gripping and novel work, full stop.  Don't just take my word for it: Penderecki thinks so too: “None of what Jonny does is a copy of what I have done.  Even his notation is different from mine.  He does things that I haven't done, and has gone in a different direction using some elements of my music.  He is very gifted. I like his music very much.

Tom Service, The Guardian (UK)

Greenwood's Popcorn Superhet Receiver (2005) is already a modern classic.  His 48 Responses is as surprising as it is original, taking the one brief moment of tonality in Penderecki's Polymorphia and developing it into a Bach-like chorale that morphs and splinters into a series of brief, hallucinatory movements.

 Stephen Pritchard, The Observer (UK)

Greenwood’s own rabid fascination with Penderecki’s work is what allows this treasure of an album to exist in the first place; his self‐admitted fanboy‐ism has resulted in crucial meet‐ups and inspired compositions, as well as a momentous joint concert in Wroclaw last year (where much of the material re‐recorded for this album was performed). Greenwood takes that final C note and lets his imagination run wild with it in the responses that follow, providing not a set of plagiarized send‐offs but completely new ideas going in different directions.

Highlighting Greenwood’s strength in drawing musical sketches, brief responses like “Es Is Genug”, “Three Oak Leaves”, and “Overhang” flirt with traditional, stoic arrangements, while “Scan”, “Pacay Tree”, and “Ranj” employ shaky percussion, fragile dissonance, and Eastern harmony, resembling Koji Endo’s scores for Japanese horror films Gozu and Audition.

David Dilillo, www.consequenceofsound.com

On 22 March, Greenwood and Penderecki were joined in London’s Barbican Hall by the AUKSO Chamber Orchestra to recreate the joint concert of their works first curated at the European Culture Congress in Wroclaw last September, and which included the world premiere of Greenwood’s 48 Responses to Polymorphia.  The packed London venue gave them a standing ovation:

… far more gripping than I had expected.  Yes, there’s an element of Penderecki-lite about the clusters and curious ways of attacking the strings (including bowing them with a percussion shaker).  But Greenwood’s own personality – odd, sensuous, romantic and nostalgic (as his nods to Bach and Vivaldi showed) – ultimately overshadowed his debts.’

Richard Morrison, The Times (UK)

The C major chord that brings Penderecki's piece to a close forms the starting point of the Bach-like chorale that Greenwood then subjects to a process of variation and fragmentation, sometimes plunging into Stravinskyan polyrhythmic territory far removed from Penderecki's inherent fluidity.

Tim Ashley, The Guardian

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