Max Richter

Reviewed by Andy Gill as "a landmark work of contemporary classical music",[18] Max Richter's solo debut Memoryhouse, an experimental album of "documentary music" recorded with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, explores real and imaginary stories and histories.[19] Several of the tracks, such as "Sarajevo", "November", "Arbenita", and "Last Days", deal with the aftermath of the Kosovo conflict, while others are of childhood memories (e.g. "Laika's Journey"). The music combines ambient sounds, voices (including that of John Cage), and poetry readings from the work of Marina Tsvetaeva. BBC Music described the album as "a masterpiece in neoclassical composition."[20] Memoryhouse was first played live by Richter at the Barbican Centre on 24 January 2014 to coincide with a vinyl re-release of the album.

Pitchfork gave the re-release an 8.7 rating, commenting on its extensive influence:

In 2002, Richter’s ability to weave subtle electronics against the grand BBC Philharmonic Orchestra helped suggest new possibilities and locate fresh audiences that composers such as Nico Muhly and Michał Jacaszek have since pursued. As you listen to new work by Julianna Barwick or Jóhann Jóhannsson, thank Richter; just as Sigur Rós did with its widescreen rock, Richter showed that crossover wasn't necessarily an artistic curse.[21]

Chosen by The Guardian as one of the best classical works of the century,[22] The Blue Notebooks, released in 2004, featured the actress Tilda Swinton reading from Kafka's The Blue Octavo Notebooks and the work of Czesław Miłosz. Richter has stated that The Blue Notebooks is a protest album about the Iraq War, as well as a meditation on his own troubled childhood.[23] Pitchfork described the album as "Not only one of the finest record of the last six months, but one of the most affecting and universal contemporary classical records in recent memory."[24] To mark the 10th anniversary of its release, Richter created a track-by-track commentary for Drowned in Sound, in which he described the album as a series of interconnected dreams and an exploration of the chasm between lived experience and imagination.[25] The second track, "On the Nature of Daylight", is used in both the opening and closing sequences of the sci-fi film Arrival,[26] and the soundtrack for Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island. It is also used in episode 3 "Long, Long Time" of HBO series The Last of Us.

On the eve of its 2018 re-issue, marking the 15th anniversary of its release, Fact named the album "one of the most iconic pieces of classical and protest music of the 21st century."[27] The re-release included a new cover design and several new tracks that were originally composed for the project. Richter also released another single, "Cypher", which is an 8 minutes classical-electronic track based upon the theme of "On the Nature of Daylight".

In 2006, he released his third solo album, Songs from Before, which features Robert Wyatt reading texts by Haruki Murakami.[28]

Richter released his fourth solo album 24 Postcards in Full Colour, a collection of 24 classically composed miniatures for ringtones, in 2008.[29] The pieces are a series of variations on the basic material, scored for strings, piano, and electronics.

Discussing the album with NPR Classical in 2017[30] Richter stated "People were downloading ringtones at the time and I felt this was a missed opportunity for composers. That there was a space opening up, maybe a billion little loudspeakers walking around the planet, but nobody was really thinking of this as a space for creative music. So I set out to make these tiny little fragments and then, of course, in the poetic sense, the idea of these little sound carrying objects traversing the planet, I started to think of these as a connection, as a sort of postcard into somebody's life, into their space."

Richter's 2010 album Infra takes as its central theme the 2005 terrorist bombings in London,[31] and is an extension of his 25-minute score for a ballet of the same name choreographed by Wayne McGregor and staged at the Royal Opera House.[32] Infra comprises music written for piano, electronics and string quintet, plus the full performance score and material that subsequently developed from the construction of the album.[33] Pitchfork described the album as "achingly gorgeous"[34] and The Independent newspaper characterised it as "a journey in 13 episodes, emerging from a blur of static and finding its way in a repeated phrase that grows in loveliness."[35]

Richter's recomposed version of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons, was premiered in the UK at the Barbican Centre on 31 October 2012, performed by the Britten Sinfonia, conducted by André de Ridder and with violinist Daniel Hope.[36] Although Richter said that he had discarded 75% of Vivaldi's original material,[37] the parts he does use are phased and looped, emphasising his grounding in postmodern and minimalist music.[38] The album topped the iTunes classical chart in the UK, Germany and the US.[39] The US launch concert in New York at Le Poisson Rouge was recorded by NPR and streamed.[40]

In 2015, Richter released his most ambitious project to date, a collaboration with visual artist, and creative partner, Yulia Mahr,[41] titled Sleep, an 8.5 hour listening experience targeted to fit a full night's rest. The album itself contains 31 compositions, most of them reaching 20–30 minutes in duration, all based around variations of 4-5 themes. The music is calm, slow, mellow and composed for piano, cello, two violas, two violins, organ, soprano vocals, synthesisers and electronics. Strings are played by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (Ben Russell, Yuki Numata Resnik, Caleb Burhans, Clarice Jensen and Brian Snow), vocals are by Grace Davidson, and the piano, synthesisers and electronics are played by Richter himself.

Richter also released a 1-hour version of the project, From Sleep, that contains roughly 1 shortened version of every "theme" from Sleep (hence its title), and is supposed to act as a shorter listening experience for the Sleep project.[42]

Richter has described Sleep as an eight-hour-long lullaby. It was released on CD and vinyl. The work was strongly influenced by Gustav Mahler's symphonic works.[43]

The entire composition was performed on 27 September 2015, from midnight to 8:00 A.M. as the climax of the "Science and Music" weekend on BBC Radio 3.[44] The performance broke several records, including the longest live broadcast of a single musical composition in the history of the network.[45]

Sleep was chosen by Jarvis Cocker to be the BBC Radio 6 Album of the year for 2015[46] and by Pitchfork as one of the 50 best ambient albums of all time.[47]

The full-length Sleep has been played live by Richter at the Concertgebouw (Grote Zaal) Amsterdam;[48] the Sydney Opera House;[49] in Berlin (as part of Berliner Festspiele's Maerz Musik Festival),[50] in Madrid (as part of Veranos de la Villa)[51] and in London (at the Barbican).[52] In November 2017, Sleep was played at the Philharmonie de Paris.[53]

Sleep was performed for its first outdoor performance and largest performance to-date in Los Angeles, CA on 27–28 July and 28–29 July 2018. The performance took place in Grand Park, opposite Los Angeles Music Center. Each performance had 560 beds and was timed so the final movement, "Dream 0 (till break of day)" would occur at dawn. Richter played with members of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble.[54]

In September 2018 it was played in the Antwerp cathedral[55] for an audience of 400 which were provided with beds for the night. In August 2019 it was performed in Helsinki, as part of the Helsinki Festival, in the tent arena, with half the audience in two-person tents.

"I think of it as a piece of protest music," Richter has said. "It’s protest music against this sort of very super industrialised, intense, mechanised way of living right now. It’s a political work in that sense. It’s a call to arms to stop what we’re doing.[56]

Three Worlds: Music From Woolf Works is Max Richter’s eighth album, released in January 2017. The music is taken from the score Richter composed for the ballet Woolf Works in collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor at the Royal Opera House in London, which follows a three-part structure offering evocations of three books by Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves). The album features classical and electronic sound as well as an original voice recording of Woolf herself.[57]

Richter's Voices project, a collaboration with visual artist Yulia Mahr,[58] is inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and features an 'upside down' orchestra, a concept he developed to reflect his dismay of post-truth politics in the 21st century. The album contains readings of the declaration by Eleanor Roosevelt and actress Kiki Layne, with a further 70 readings crowd-sourced from around the world.[59]

The accompanying music videos by Yulia Mahr[60] dealt with the artist's own experiences of migration. The video 'Mercy'[61] won a BAFTA award.[62]

The opening piece on the album was played by Yo-Yo Ma at his concert "A New Equilibrium"[63] honouring the 75th anniversary of the UN's creation.

On 6 August 2021, the new album Exiles was released. The album was recorded in 2019, in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, with the collaboration of a conductor Kristjan Järvi and the Baltic Sea Philharmonic.[64] The Exiles also includes extended versions of previously released works such as "The Haunted Ocean", "Infra 5", "Flowers Of Herself", "On The Nature Of Daylight" and "Sunlight".[65] Max Richter describes the Exile album as a serious work because of its theme of the subject, which has an emotional texture.[66]