On 7 November the Queensland Symphony Orchestra and Umberto Clerici perform Jonny Greenwood’s 48 Responses to Polymorphia. The 19-minute work is programmed alongside Krzysztof Penderecki's 1962 masterpiece Polymorphia for 48 string instruments, which provided the foundation for Greenwood’s 2011 piece. Both summon an astonishing array of effects from the strings, including microtones, slapping the instruments, and playing on the tailpiece and behind the bridge, creating flickering harmonic clouds and scurrying, insectoid textures. Its starting point is the expectation-defying C-major chord that concludes Penderecki’s piece, which Greenwood explores and reimagines across nine movements.
Penderecki, who died in 2021, has been a powerful influence on Greenwood’s music since the early 1990s; the composer conducted his own work in the same concert as Marek Mos and AUKSO’s premiere of Greenwood’s piece in Poland in 2011 at the European Culture Congress in Wroclaw; they subsequently recorded the work alongside Greenwood’s Popcorn Superhet Receiver in 2012.
Greenwood pays special tribute to the composer in section four of the work, ‘Three Oak Leaves’. Three images of a purple oak leaf (from the composer’s garden) are superimposed onto bass and treble staves, and the veined structure of the leaf determines the movement of the players out from a single note onto other pitches; Greenwood’s nod to the arboretum the composer founded with his wife. Extracts of the work were subsequently used by Greenwood as part of his score for the Paul Thomas Anderson 2012 film, The Master.
In 2013 extracts from the piece were danced by the Australian Ballet, choreographed by Benjamin Stuart-Carberry, as part of Polymorphia. It received its Australian concert premiere in full from Richard Tognetti and musicians from the Australian National Academy of Music in Melbourne in 2017. It has also been taken up by Ensemble Resonanz with the Scottish Ensemble and Trondheim Soloists, MDR Sinfonieorchester, and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.