On 26 February Jonny Greenwood’s Violin Concerto – æþm – premieres with Daniel Pioro, the Hallé Orchestra, and Hugh Tieppo-Brunt. The 32-minute work, for violin and 56 solo strings, was inspired by his 2019 work Horror vacui, which premiered at the BBC Proms. It appeared as part of a focus on Greenwood at the Hallé alongside his Water. Pioro and André de Ridder will give the Dutch premiere of the work on 16 May with the Nederlands Philharmonisch Orkest at the Concertgebouw, as part of the NTR ZaterdagMatinee series.
...The Hallé’s sound...morphed from ethereal to ecstatic, ghostly to overwhelming...An outburst of wailing glissandi sets the concerto in motion, and throughout we encounter siren-like screams and ominous sinking harmonies...intriguing contrasts of pace and material...Pioro always commanded our attention, whether navigating intense double-stopping, fluttering arabesques or lines of angular intensity. After a false ending, the concerto built to a glorious tutti before dissipating into silence — and an immediate standing ovation.
The Times (Rebecca Franks) 27 February 2026 ****
The new Concerto draws from various imaginative sources. One is the work of Japanese composer Isao Tomita, whose work used electronics to mimic conventional orchestral sounds in the 1970s; Greenwood borrows the sounds created from these experiments and re-orchestrates back into the large body of strings – a move partly inspired by Penderecki (one of Greenwood’s icons) who reworked electronic sounds into orchestral textures in the 1960s.
The live realisation of these effects is part of the piece’s excitement for Greenwood. “Having the orchestra interpret these colours”, he notes in an interview with the orchestra, “would be far more vivid and interesting than just pumping digital tones from hissing speakers. More can go wrong was an orchestra, and there’s far more interesting complexity in trying to harness the individual decision-making and character of all those players”. Accordingly, the subtitle of the Concerto – æþm – describes the breath of a living creature.
Cast in four parts, with two interludes between the first and second and third and four movements, the concerto is about treating the orchestra as a resonator for Pioro’s solo violin and exploring how various digital and analogue sound processing can be reinterpreted with technology as old as a conventional string section”. The solo violin writing – at times quasi-improvisatory, sometimes spinning long cantabile lines, at others more brittle and virtuosic – has its music refracted by the large body of strings.
Pioro premiered Horror vacui, the work’s precursor, at the Proms in 2019 with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Hugh Tieppo-Brunt. He has given numerous performances with Greenwood of Three Miniatures from ‘Water’ – a 10-minute work for violin, piano, 2 tanpuras and cello/bass drone – including at the Proms (alongside the violin concerto), BBC Radio 6 Music, Tivoli Vredenburg, Utrecht, and Teatro dell'Aquila, Fermo, Marche – listen to his recording with Greenwood here.