On the morning of Sept. 12, 2011, a white Land Rover with a dragon on the door ferried the Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, his longtime recording engineer Graeme Stewart and Radiohead’s co-manager Chris Hufford to Alvernia Studios, about an hour outside Krakow, Poland. For several years, when he’s not recording or touring with Radiohead, Greenwood has pursued a second career as a composer of orchestral music, and this day he was cutting new versions of two of his classical pieces, “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” (17 minutes, inspired in part by the sound of radio static) and “48 Responses to Polymorphia,” both of which are unabashed tributes to the early-’60s output of the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, whose compositions abandoned melody in favor of dense, dissonant tone clusters. Greenwood’s recordings will be featured on an album due out in March on Nonesuch Records, along with two new performances of Penderecki’s work conducted by Penderecki himself.

Greenwood cites an early-’90s concert of Penderecki’s music as a conversion experience; he’s obsessed with Penderecki the way a lot of people are obsessed with Radiohead. Chances are you’ve heard Penderecki’s music even if you think you haven’t; some of his more screaming-of-the-damned­ish pieces turned up on the soundtracks to “The Exorcist” and “The Shining,” and that’s his “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” seemingly ringing in Clive Owen’s ears during the long urban-warfare tracking shot near the end of “Children of Men.” So there was something full-circle about the Sept. 12 session, given that Greenwood owes his profile as a classical composer in large part to his work in film, particularly his deeply Penderecki-indebted score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood.”