Max Richter

Max Richter

Ensemble:
Eloisa Fleur Thom and Max Baillie, violins
Connie Pharoah, viola
Max Ruisi and Zara Hudson-Kozdoj, cellos

Max Richter is one of the most influential and acclaimed composers of all time. His fusion of classical technique and electronic technology, heard across genre-defining solo albums and countless scores for film, dance, art and fashion, has won him legions of fans around the world and blazed a trail for a generation of musicians. His ninth solo album – the first to be written and recorded at his serene new studio in rural Oxfordshire – is a fleeting self-portrait of a musician in constant motion. In A Landscape is a record about “reconciling polarities”, as Richter puts it, bringing together the electronic and the acoustic, the human and the natural world, the big questions of life and the quiet pleasures of living.

The 19-track album began life in summer 2022 as a natural counterweight to the urgent political tenor of his previous projects: Exiles, a ballet score about the refugee crisis, and Voices, constructed with a “negative orchestra” and hundreds of readings of the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights. Richter’s ongoing commissions, meanwhile, were similarly dramatic and conceptual, including a ballet adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s post-apocalyptic MADDADDAM, music for a Mark Rothko retrospective and scores for Johan Renck’s sci-fi drama Spaceman and the Elisabeth Moss spy thriller The Veil.

Over the last two decades, Richter has brought his distinctly humane and emotive sensibility to a series of ambitious projects – among them, a reimagining of Vivaldi’s violin concertos, the landmark nine-hour album Sleep and his score for Wayne McGregor’s ballet Woolf Works – along with acclaimed solo records tackling human rights, migration and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. After spending many years grappling with big ideas and thorny social and political questions, the making of In A Landscape has opened up another, greener world for Richter. Making music remains, above all, “a way to make a kind of alternate reality”, a constructed world “where everything is in its place”.

Presented by NCH