Thursday 24 February 2026
Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
*****
‘A mature work from a highly accomplished composer’ – Jonny Greenwood’s new violin concerto performed by Daniel Pioro and The Hallé
Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood has been a classical composer for the last twenty years. His film scores, including There Will be Blood (2007), Phantom Thread (2017,) The Power of the Dog (2021), and One Battle After Another (2026) have received multiple award nominations. On Thursday evening, the Hallé, under the baton of Hugh Tieppo-Brunt performed two of his works, including his new Violin Concerto. He also played bass guitar and tanpura, a four-stringed Indian instrument with a long neck.
Greenwood is a huge fan of twentieth-century classical composers, including Olivier Messiaen, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Steve Reich, whose work we heard in the second half of the concert. The concert opened with a piece by the Polish composer Witold Lutosławski, his Musique Funèbre (Funeral Music) for string orchestra, written in the 1950s in memory of the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, who died in 1945. There are strong echoes of Bartók’s music in Lutosławski’s piece, but it also marks the beginning of a new modernist language in his work, including the use of twelve-tone technique: the piece begins with a twelve-note row.
Musique Funèbre began with a mournful, lugubrious tone row on solo cello, joined by a second cello and viola, with an eerie sense of mystery. The rest of the cello section made the texture denser, and the violins joined like trees sprouting in a dense forest. The music became obsessed with the tritone, giving it a sense of anxious instability. An elegant orchestral dance, beautifully controlled by Hugh Tieppo-Brunt, was filled with sadness, with Bartókian offbeat rhythms, the lower strings offset against the upper strings in fierce dialogue. The music reached an anguished climax with a repeated twelve-tone chord. A rich and imposing unison melody arrived, like a threnody. The tritone returned, with a chamber music section that reminded us of Bartók’s skill as a composer of some of the finest string quartets of the 20th century. The piece ended with another tribute to Bartók, a canon that symmetrically mirrored the opening section, a device the Hungarian composer used in his string quartets and his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936). It felt as if the cellos were creeping dolefully back to where they came from, and we ended where we started with a solo cello. The magic of both Bartók and Lutosławski is that powerful emotions are drawn out of tight musical structures, which the Hallé strings did superbly here.
Jonny Greenwood’s Water is inspired by lines from the poem of the same name by the English poet Philip Larkin, who died in 1985. Larkin’s poem celebrates water not as a liquid essential to life on our planet, but as something on which a secular religion could be constructed. Greenwood’s piece has a ritualistic element in its use of the tanpura drone on which the work sits. The piece also views water from many angles, as in the glass of water in Larkin’s poem.
And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.
Philip Larkin, 'Water' from 'The Whitsun Weddings'(Faber,1964)
The piece began with limpid, watery textures on the upper strings, piano and organ. A revolving, minimalist theme was underpinned by the richly exotic sound of the tanpuras, played on Thursday by Greenwood, Sharona Katan and Mehrbaan Singh. The music felt like light glinting on water, then it rose like water constantly rising. Changes of key came in watery waves. The music endlessly cycled back on itself, creating a glittering sound world within a narrow compass of light and optimism. A low organ pedal note added another kind of drone. The music flowed like water, endlessly moving until the tanpura drones were revealed in a solo passage. Harmonics from the upper strings joined the drones, like sunlight dancing on water. There were two particularly magical moments: a duet between piano and strings, unfolding like gorgeous lilies floating on water; and swelling organ chords that led to a section where the drones dropped out, and all the strings pulsated. There was a brief expression of ecstatic joy, then the main theme unwound itself gradually. Sparkling organ chords that could have been written by Messiaen led to a final, frenetic violin solo.
The second half of the concert began with Pulse by the American composer Steve Reich, which Greenwood performed with the orchestra in the Manchester Classical festival last summer. It’s an attractive, melodic piece for winds, strings, piano and electric bass. According to the score, it never rises above mezzo-forte, and it’s a calm, contemplative work. In his note on the piece, Reich wrote that it was a reaction to his Quartet of 2013 which ‘changed keys more frequently than in any previous work’ of his,
In Pulse I felt the need to stay put harmonically and spin out smoother wind and string melodic lines in canon over a constant pulse in the electric bass and or piano.
Pairing the piece with Greenwood’s Water brought out the airy lightness of Pulse, which moved on continually like long sections of Greenwood’s piece. Greenwood played a gentle bass part that was rhythmic and propulsive. The bass felt like the drone in Water, an almost constant presence. When the bass dropped out, we felt it by its absence; a subtle effect. Tieppo-Brunt conducted calmly, keeping a simple beat going. The pleasure of this music was partly listening out for subtle changes, such as the key changes, which were rare but delicious when they came. There was a moment of hope when the bass line began rising, before falling back again. The piece ended with a light-infused section when the bass re-joined with the opening theme. Greenwood left the stage first, with a shy, gentle wave to the audience.
The concert ended with Jonny Greenwood’s Violin Concerto, an almost complete rewriting of Horror Vacui, which premiered at the Proms in 2019. In his note on the piece, Greenwood wrote that he was inspired, tonally, by the electronic works of the Japanese composer Isao Tomita, who is perhaps best known for his arrangements of classical works on his pioneering 1974 album Snowflakes Are Dancing. Greenwood was also inspired by Penderecki’s ‘orchestrations of the electronics and sounds’ of the 1960s, and his conviction that ‘the same sounds could be conveyed more interestingly with strings.’ The piece is scored for solo violin and ’56 solo strings’, which were arranged on Thursday in a semi-circular formation.
The piece began with swirling strings; we were immediately lost in a dense, terrifying forest. Violin soloist Daniel Pioro played a theme that could have come from a classical interpretation of a gypsy dance. The strings provided what sounded like an artificial studio reverb, on one of the many occasions in this work when Greenwood used the orchestra to recreate digital and analogue sound processing, to stunning effect. The concerto also used whole-tone intervals and microtones to brilliant effect. An evocative sinking theme often recurred. Another theme. with a Tomita-like analogue synth tone, passed around the orchestra. Pioro played a romantic lead line, gently virtuosic. The orchestra then asserted itself with strings that could have come from a film noir soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann. Pioro played an almost cadenza-like section, but with orchestral accompaniment. The orchestra roused itself again, as pulsating notes drifted down microtonally, chopped up as if treated by gated reverb. At one point, glancing up from the notes I was writing, I looked for the effects unit that was creating all these effects, then remembered it wasn’t there…
Music that starts and ends with the push of a space-bar appeals less and less to me: where’s the peril? In this work, the conductor is key. I think of it as a piece of music for solo violin, string orchestra and conductor – as three equals.
Jonny Greenwood on his Violin Concerto (2026)
This was a mature work from a highly accomplished composer. It created its own unique sound world, often the mark of a great work. In a remarkable passage, the strings wound themselves up again like an infernal machine, and Pioro valiantly tried to assert himself against a wall of noise. The violin gradually asserted itself, sometimes joined by harmonies from the massed strings. Had the violin won? Pioro played a mournful melody that could have come from the Lutosławski piece we heard earlier; another threnody? In reply, the whole orchestra seethed, wheeling up and down like the bellows of a giant steam engine. Pioro, whose performance was superb throughout, played an eerie, slippery line, which the orchestra echoed sarcastically with fractured echoes. A romantic violin solo found the orchestra almost in agreement with the soloist, surrounding him with a halo of consonance. An ecstatic Baroque section felt like Vivaldi thrown out of shape, heard in fever dream. The concerto ended with a single held solo note, with consonant harmonics like the end of a conventional violin concerto… until it drifted off into the ether, unstable to the end.
Repertoire
Witold Lutosławski Musique funèbre
Jonny Greenwood Water
Steve Reich Pulse
Jonny Greenwood Violin Concerto
Performers
The Hallé Orchestra
Hugh Tieppo-Brunt conductor
Daniel Pioro violin
Jonny Greenwood bass guitar and tanpura
Sharona Katan and Mehrbaan Singh tanpura
Sources
Programme notes by Steve Reich and Jonny Greenwood
Read on…
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Manchester Classical 2025 Opening Night – Greenwood and The Hallé perform Steve Reich
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