On 8 November the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and Silver Ainomäe give the Estonian debut of Jonny Greenwood’s Suite from There Will Be Blood from string orchestra at the House of the Blackheads.
The 16-minute selection from Greenwood’s score comprises six cues from Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar-winning movie: ‘Open Spaces’, ‘Future Markets’, ‘Hope of New Fields’, ‘Henry Plainview’, ‘Proven Lands’, and ‘Oil’. Greenwood’s music draws on his debt to the string writing of Penderecki with its multi-layered, slow-moving clusters for divided strings, creating a tense atmosphere of foreboding that captures the noir-feel of this Western. Elsewhere the writing is rhythmically rugged and jerkily aggressive, capturing the rough-hewn qualities of both landscape and character.
Performed over 100 times worldwide to date, the Suite has been recorded by André de Ridder and the Copenhagen Philharmonic in 2014 and by Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra live in concert in 2019; it has toured with the Netherlands Philharmonic and Scottish Ensemble. The suite also features an optional part for the ondes Martenot that is such a distinctive feature of the soundtrack. It last appeared in the Baltics in October 2024, where it received its Lithuanian premiere from Hugo Ticciati and the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra.
Proven Lands (2005/2007/arr. 2012), a 2-minute excerpt for strings from the film, receives two choreographic treatments this autumn. It appeared as part of Tim Harbour’s The Delivery – an Aussie-noir graphic-fiction mystery ballet – for the Australian Ballet, in rep at Arts Centre Melbourne from 15-18 October, and was choreographed by Andrey Kaydanovskiy for Tanz Linz as part of Shakespeare’s Dream – a dramatic, ironic, and witty reflection whose starting points are the murders in the playwright’s work. Proven Lands showcases percussive string writing: players use plectrums for pizzicato and raw, pitchless strumming; double bass players slap their instruments and pluck swooping glissandi intended to sound like a loose-skinned bass drum.
In 2024 Greenwood’s music for strings appeared at the Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen as part of Am I doing it right?, choreographed by Carling Talcott-Steenstra for the triple-bill Koreorama no.2, the company’s new choreographic laboratory. The ballet used music from Popcorn Superhet Receiver and 48 Responses to Polymorphia, as well as selections from There Will Be Blood.