It's crazy but I love every single note and every single tone in your compositions. Your music is beyond sublime and transcends beautiful. And yet , no words of praise can do it justice. 

This is my favorite instrumental piece of all time, truly beautiful

Voyager - Essential Max Richter

John Tavener "The Lamb"

Songs From Before

Autumn Music 2

Movie Night – The Greatest Film Themes

On The Nature Of Daylight [Richter] (From "Shutter Island")

FANTASIA for String Quintet, original neo-baroque work from the album "An Evening At Ulm" by Irminsul

Fantasia for String Quintet

Recomposed By Max Richter: Vivaldi, The Four Seasons

Spring 0 (2012)

Originally conceived as a Royal Ballet-commissioned collaboration between composer Max Richter, choreographer Wayne McGregor and artist Julian Opie, Max Richter’s gorgeous score to ‘infra’ is deservedly given life of its own in this album-length release from FatCat’s instrumental/orchestral imprint 130701 Records.

The initial setting for ‘infra’ was as a ballet - written in autumn 2008 and premiered in November of the same year at The Royal Opera House in London – although here Richter’s score is given the full scope of a standalone new album. Expanded and extended from the original piece, ‘infra’ comprises music written for piano, electronics and string quintet, including the full performance score as well as material that has subsequently developed from the construction of the album – more a continued reference to the ballet than as a “studio album” in the strictest sense. The composition resonates with Max’s characteristic musical voice – majestic, involved textures; fluent and sweeping melodies; an enigmatic and inherently intellectual understanding of harmonic complexities that compels and mesmerizes.

Richter’s work on the ballet came initially from McGregor’s invitiation, a request for 25 minutes of music for his piece, inspired by T.S. Elliot’s ‘The Wasteland’ and named after the Latin term for ‘below’. This eventually became more collaborative as the project developed – Wayne would ask for Max to extend or alter certain passages of music in accordance with his own amendments to his choreography and concept, whilst logging the whole process for a BBC documentary (broadcast, along with the ballet in full, on BBC2 in November 2008). The dance performance was backed with digital images created by Julian Opie – observational scenes of street life, haunting and curiously balletic despite being of the everyday – and Max’s score is an appropriately close reference to the traveling theme:

“I started thinking about making a piece on the theme of journeys. Like a road movie. Or a traveler’s notebook. Or like the second unit in a film - when the scene has been played, and the image cuts away to the landscape going by. This started me thinking about Schubert's devastating and haunting "Winterreise" (Winter Journey), so I used some melodic material from Schubert as a found object in parts of my new piece.“

The recording of ‘infra’ took place in one day at London’s AIR Studios – recorded onto 2” tape, engineered by Nick Wollage and overseen by Max - before a return to the mixing studio (Max’s StudioKino and Trixx in Berlin) for Max’s typically intricate and lengthy process of crafting completed pieces from the recordings.

Infra

Infra 8

A Catalogue Of Afternoons

A Catalogue of Afternoons

For more information visit: http://www.klassikakzente.de/recomposed/home 

Some works are so familiar that it is almost impossible to hear them afresh, but that is what Max Richter has achieved with Vivaldi “Recomposed”. This is no mere arrangement; instead Richter has absorbed Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons into his own musical bloodstream. At first Richter followed the example of other works in the “Recomposed” series, which re-mix existing recordings, but, he says, “I wanted to open up the score on a note-by-note level, and working with an existing recording was like digging a mineshaft through an incredibly rich seam, discovering diamonds and not being able to pull them out. That became frustrating. I wanted to get inside the score at the level of the notes and in essence re-write it, re-composing it in a literal way.”Richter calculates that, in the process, he has discarded around three-quarters of Vivaldi’s original. He opens with what he describes as “a dubby cloud which I’ve called Spring 0. It functions as a sort of prelude, setting up an electronic, ambient space for the first Spring movement to step into. I’ve used electronics in several movements, subtle, almost inaudible things to do withthe bass, but I wanted certain moments to connect to the whole electronic universe that is so much part of our musical language today.” Other resonances are no less unexpected: Richter describes part of the first movement of his Summer as “heavy music for the orchestra. It’s relentless pulsed music, which is a quality that contemporary dance music has; and perhaps I was also thinking about John Bonham’s drumming. Then, in the second movement of Autumn I asked the harpsichordist Raphael Alpermann to play in what is a rather old-fashioned way, very regularly, rather like a ticking clock. That was partly because I didn’t want the harpsichord part to be attention-seeking, but also because that style connects to various pop records from the 1970s where the harpsichord or Clavinet was featured, including various Beach Boys albums and the Beatles’ Abbey Road.” Clearly, Richter has brought his own frame of reference to the project. As he says, “Vivaldi’s music is made of regular patterns, and that connects with post-minimalism, which is one strand in the music that I write. That felt like a natural link, but even so it was surprisingly difficult to navigate my way through it. At every point I had to work out how much is Vivaldi and how much is me. It was difficult but also rewarding because the raw material is so fascinating.”Just as Richter’s Seasons plays tricks with the way we hear Vivaldi’s original, so it also asks questions of the soloist, Daniel Hope. “Violinists have Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons hardwired in their brain. Daniel is likely to play the original I don’t know how many times in a year, and for him to have my parallel text going on in another part of his brain is a challenge. I think he did a wonderful job. He brought to it a deep engagement with the original, but he was fully prepared to cut this new swathe through the text.”


Classics For Hope

Spring 1 (2012)

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Max Richter trained in composition and piano at Edinburgh University, at the Royal Academy of Music, and with Luciano Berio in Florence.

On completing his studies, Max co-founded the iconoclastic classical ensemble Piano Circus, where he stayed for ten years, commissioning and performing works by Arvo Pärt, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Julia Wolfe and Steve Reich.

In the late 90s he worked with a number of electronic artists, notably Future Sound of London on their album 'Dead Cities". He subsequently collaborated with FSOL over a period of two years, also contributing to the albums "The Isness" and "The Peppermint Tree and Seeds of Superconsciousness". Max also collaborated with Mercury Prize winner Roni Size, on "In the Mode".

In June 2002, Max released his debut solo album, "memoryhouse", recorded with The BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. This was followed in March 2004 by FatCat's release of "The Blue Notebooks", with featured readings by Tilda Swinton.

In 2005 Max produced Vashti Bunyan's outstanding comeback album "Lookaftering".

2006 saw the release of "Songs From Before" based on Haruki Murakami texts read by Robert Wyatt. That same year, Max began performing "from The Art of Mirrors", an evolving score to previously unseen Super 8mm films of Derek Jarman.

Max's more recent work continues to stretch the notions of what Classical music is.  ‘24 Postcards In Full Colour’, released in August 2008, is an experimental work made up of 24 composed ringtones.

Max works widely in film music, installation and the theatre, most recently on INFRA, made with Wayne MacGregor and Julian Opie for The Royal Ballet, London. The Ballet was the subject of a BBC 'making of' documentary.

Max was named 2008 European Composer Of The Year for his score to Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir, for which he was also nominated for the Prix France Musique.

Infra 8

max richter

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