Jonny Greenwood - Chamber Composer?

When Radiohead performs Friday at the Outside Lands Festival in Golden Gate Park, tens of thousands of fans will be there. Typical enough. Less typical is Thursday night's concert at San Francisco's Herbst Theatre (capacity: 916), where an orchestral piece composed by Jonny Greenwood, Radiohead's lead guitarist, will have its first performance on the West Coast.

You read it right. Greenwood, whose influences range from jazz trumpeter Miles Davis to French visionary composer Olivier Messiaen, has penned the work "Popcorn Superhet Receiver" for a 36-piece string orchestra. It can be sensual, almost like Debussy, or as weightless as radio waves. (Its title refers to the superheterodyne receiver in radio electronics.)

And it offers an entry point for newcomers to classical music. That fact isn't lost on 28-year-old conductor Benjamin Shwartz, leader of the orchestra at Thursday night's event, who has become a missionary on behalf of classical music to generations X and Y.

Resident conductor at the San Francisco Symphony, where he works alongside music director Michael Tilson Thomas (and leads the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra), Shwartz has also been taking classical music into the world of night clubs, light shows, DJs and electronica.