Royal Albert Hall, LondonThe Radiohead guitarist proves he’s no classical dilettante with this rigorously curated prom and the premiere of his own startling piece for strings, Horror Vacui
There is no shortage of people from the world of rock entering the ambit of “serious” orchestral composition. But even many of the better practitioners – Jóhann Jóhannsson or Clint Mansell, for example – write
music that often betrays their background in the digital world. You can almost hear the vestiges of music-making software in their arrangements, as if they have been plotted on graph paper.
This is never the case with Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, whose orchestral film scores have an intense rigour and musicianship that are certainly on display tonight. We hear extracts from his 2012 suite Water, for instance, which was composed entirely in the octatonic scale popular with Rimsky-Korsakov and Messiaen – but here Greenwood gives the melody the intensity of an Indian raga by playing an accompanying drone on a tambura. His devilishly complex piece for solo piano, 88, is brilliantly executed by pianist Katherine Tinker, who sounds as though she’s playing a transcription of a Thelonious Monk solo at double-speed.