Max Richter (composer)

Max Richter (; ; born 22 March 1966) is a German-born British composer and pianist. He works within postminimalist and contemporary classical styles. Richter is classically trained, having graduated in composition from the University of Edinburgh, the Royal Academy of Music in London, and studied with Luciano Berio in Italy.

Richter arranges, performs, and composes music for stage, opera, ballet and screen. He has collaborated with other musicians, as well as with performance, installation and media artists. He has recorded eight solo albums, and his music is widely used in cinema. As of December 2019, Richter has passed one billion streams and one million album sales.

Early life and career

Richter was born in Hamelin, Lower Saxony, West Germany. He grew up in Bedford, England, United Kingdom, and his education was at Bedford Modern School and Mander College of Further Education. He studied composition and piano at the University of Edinburgh, at the Royal Academy of Music, and with Luciano Berio in Florence. After finishing his studies, Richter co-founded the contemporary classical ensemble Piano Circus. He stayed with the group for ten years, commissioning and performing works by minimalist musicians such as Arvo Pärt, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Julia Wolfe, and Steve Reich. The ensemble was signed to Decca/Argo, producing five albums.

In 1996, Richter collaborated with Future Sound of London on the album ''Dead Cities'', first as a pianist, but ultimately working on several tracks and co-writing the track "Max". He worked with the band for two years, also contributing to the albums ''The Isness'' and '' The Peppermint Tree and Seeds of Superconsciousness''. In 2000, Richter worked with Mercury Prize winner Roni Size on the Reprazent album '' In the Møde''. He produced Vashti Bunyan's 2005 album '' Lookaftering'' and Kelli Ali's 2008 album ''Rocking Horse''.

Solo work

Richter's solo albums include:

''Memoryhouse'' (2002)

Reviewed by Andy Gill as "a landmark work of contemporary classical music", Richter's solo debut, '' Memoryhouse'', an experimental album of "documentary music" recorded with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, explores real and imaginary stories and histories. 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 called the album "a masterpiece in neoclassical composition." ''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.

''The Blue Notebooks'' (2004)

Named by ''The Guardian'' as one of the best classical works of the century, '' 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 said that ''The Blue Notebooks'' is a protest album about the Iraq War, as well as a meditation on his own troubled childhood. ''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." 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. The second track, "On the Nature of Daylight", is used in both the opening and closing sequences of the sci-fi film ''Arrival'' and on the soundtrack of Martin Scorsese's '' Shutter Island''. It is also used in episode 3, " Long, Long Time", of the HBO series ''The Last of Us''.

On the eve of its 2018 reissue, 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." 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", an 8-minute classical-electronic track based upon the theme of "On the Nature of Daylight".

''Songs from Before'' (2006)

In 2006, Richter released his third solo album, '' Songs from Before'', which features Robert Wyatt reading texts by Haruki Murakami.

''24 Postcards in Full Colour'' (2008)

Richter released his fourth solo album ''24 Postcards in Full Colour'', a collection of 24 classically composed miniatures for ringtones, in 2008. 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, Richter said: "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 sounds 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."

''Infra'' (2010)

Richter's 2010 album '' Infra'' takes as its central theme the 2005 terrorist bombings in London, 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. ''Infra'' comprises music written for piano, electronics, and string quintet, plus the full performance score and material that developed from the construction of the album.
''Pitchfork'' called the album "achingly gorgeous" and ''The Independent'' 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".

''Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons'' (2012)

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 by the Britten Sinfonia, conducted by André de Ridder with violinist Daniel Hope. Richter said he had discarded 75% of Vivaldi's original material, but the parts he kept are phased and looped, emphasising his grounding in postmodern and minimalist music, and leading one critic to quip parenthetically, "(Perhaps you could call Richter a baroque ''de''composer?)." The album topped the iTunes classical chart in the UK, Germany, and the US. The US launch concert in New York at Le Poisson Rouge was recorded by NPR and streamed.

''Sleep'' and '' From Sleep'' (2015)

In 2015, Richter released his most ambitious project to date, a collaboration with visual artist and creative partner Yulia Mahr titled ''Sleep'', an 8.5-hour listening experience targeted to fit a full night's rest. The album contains 31 compositions, most of them 20–30 minutes in duration, all based on variations of 4-5 themes. The music is calm, slow, and 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.

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

Richter has called ''Sleep'' an eight-hour-long lullaby. The work was strongly influenced by Gustav Mahler's symphonic works.

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

Jarvis Cocker chose ''Sleep'' as the BBC Radio 6 album of the year for 2015. ''Pitchfork'' named it one of the 50 best ambient albums of all time.

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

''Sleep'' was performed for its first outdoor performance and largest performance to date in Los Angeles on 27–28 July and 28–29 July 2018. The performances 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.

In September 2018, ''Sleep'' was played in the Antwerp cathedral for an audience of 400, who were given 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.

In March 2025, a full-length performance took place in the Vienna Arsenal, in the Malersaal, a location normally used as a painter’s workshop for opera and stage production decor and backdrops.

"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.

''Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works'' (2017)

''Three Worlds: Music From Woolf Works'' is Richter’s eighth album, released in January 2017. The music is taken from his score for the ballet ''Woolf Works'', choreographed by 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 a voice recording of Woolf herself.

''Voices'' (2020)

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

Mahr's accompanying videos deal with the artist's own experiences of migration. The video 'Mercy' won a BAFTA award.

Yo-Yo Ma played the album's opening piece at his concert "A New Equilibrium" honouring the 75th anniversary of the UN's creation.

''Exiles'' (2021)

On 6 August 2021, the album ''Exiles'' was released. It was recorded in 2019, in Tallinn, Estonia, with the collaboration of conductor Kristjan Järvi and the Baltic Sea Philharmonic. ''Exiles'' includes extended versions of previously released works such as "The Haunted Ocean", "Infra 5", "Flowers Of Herself", "On The Nature Of Daylight" and "Sunlight". Richter has called the album a serious work because of its subject, which has an emotional texture.

Film and television work

Richter has written many film and television soundtracks over the years. He rose to prominence with his score to Ari Folman's Golden Globe-winning film ''Waltz with Bashir'' in 2007, which uses synth-based sounds and won him the European Film Award for Best Composer. He also scored the independent feature film ''Henry May Long'', starring Randy Sharp and Brian Barnhart, in 2008, and wrote the music for Feo Aladag's film ''Die Fremde'' (with additional music by Stéphane Moucha).

In 2010, Dinah Washington's " This Bitter Earth" was remixed with Richter's " On the Nature of Daylight" for the Martin Scorsese film '' Shutter Island''. In July 2010, "On the Nature of Daylight" and "Vladimir's Blues" were featured throughout the BBC Two two-part drama ''Dive'', co-written by Dominic Savage and Simon Stevens. "On the Nature of Daylight" was also featured in an episode of HBO's television series ''Luck''. Four tracks—"Europe, After the Rain", "The Twins (Prague)", "Fragment", and "Embers"—were used in the six-part 2005 BBC documentary ''Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution''. Richter also wrote the soundtrack to Peter Richardson's documentary ''How to Die in Oregon'' and the score to ''Impardonnables'', directed by André Téchiné.

An excerpt of the song "Sarajevo" from '' Memoryhouse'' was used in the international trailer for Ridley Scott's film ''Prometheus''. The track "November", from the same album, was featured in the international trailer for Terrence Malick's 2012 film ''To the Wonder'' and in the trailer for Clint Eastwood's 2011 film ''J. Edgar''. Films featuring Richter's music released in 2011 include French drama ''Sarah's Key'' by Gilles Paquet-Brenner and David MacKenzie's romantic thriller ''Perfect Sense''. In 2012 he composed the scores for Henry Alex Rubin's '' Disconnect'' and Cate Shortland's Australian-German war thriller ''Lore''. Richter again collaborated with Folman on '' The Congress'', released in 2013.

Richter composed the original soundtrack for the HBO series '' The Leftovers'', created by Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta, which premiered in June 2014. Some of these compositions are included in the albums ''Memoryhouse'' and ''The Blue Notebooks''. He also composed the score for the feature film ''Testament of Youth'' in 2014.

In 2016 Richter composed the score to " Nosedive", an episode of ''Black Mirror''. Also that year, he scored Luke Scott's debut feature ''Morgan'' and the political thriller ''Miss Sloane'', while his piece "On the Nature of Daylight" opened and closed Denis Villeneuve's film ''Arrival''. "On the Nature Of Daylight" also closes episode 7 of ''Castle Rock'', "The Queen". He composed all the music in BBC One's drama ''Taboo'', broadcast in January and February 2017.

In 2017 ''The Current War'' used Richter's "Spring 1" and documentary filmmaker Nancy Buirski used the track combining Dinah Washington's "This Bitter Earth" with Richter's "On The Nature of Daylight", first heard in ''Shutter Island'', in her film ''Recy Taylor''. In December 2017 an excerpt of '' Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons'' was used in ''The Crown'' as the theme for Princess Margaret's (Vanessa Kirby) turbulent courtship with photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones (Matthew Goode).

In 2018 Richter composed music for the films '' Hostiles'', ''White Boy Rick'', ''Never Look Away'', and ''Mary Queen of Scots''. He also composed music for the HBO mini-series '' My Brilliant Friend''. In 2019 Richter scored the film ''Ad Astra'', with additional music by Nils Frahm and Lorne Balfe. An excerpt of his rendition of ''Dona nobis pacem'' was used for the fifth season of the BBC series ''Peaky Blinders''.

In 2021 "On The Nature of Daylight" was again used in a TV show, ''The Handmaid's Tale'', for a scene in season 4, episode 9. Three years earlier, Elisabeth Moss, the show's lead actress, starred in the video for the piece. As a director of the episode, as well as the star, she specifically chose the piece. In October 2021 Richter composed the score for the Apple TV series ''Invasion''.

In 2023 "On The Nature of Daylight" was featured in the third episode of the HBO series ''The Last of Us''.

In November 2024 Richter was a guest on BBC's '' Later... with Jools Holland''.

Ballet, opera and stage works

Richter wrote the score to '' Infra'' as part of a Royal Ballet-commissioned collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor and artist Julian Opie. The production was staged at the Royal Opera House in London in 2008. In 2011, Richter composed a chamber opera based on neuroscientist David Eagleman's book '' Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives''. The opera was choreographed by Wayne McGregor and premiered at the Royal Opera House Linbury Studio Theatre in 2012. The piece received positive reviews, with London's Evening Standard saying " tfits together rather beautifully". Their collaboration continued in April 2014 with Wayne McGregor's 'Kairos'; a ballet set to Richter's recomposition of the Four Seasons and part of a collaborative program involving three different choreographers titled 'Notations' with Ballett Zürich. In 2015 Richter and McGregor collaborated again on a new full-length ballet, ''Woolf Works'', inspired by three novels by Virginia Woolf.

Crystal Pite has also choreographed a ballet to Richter's ''Vivaldi Recomposed'', titled ''The Seasons' Canon'', which premiered at the Opera National de Paris in 2016. Sol Leon and Paul Lightfoot choreographed a piece to Richter's "Exiles" for the Nederlands Dans Theater.

In 2012/13, Richter contributed music to The National Theatre of Scotland's production of ''Macbeth'', starring Alan Cumming. The play opened at New York's Lincoln Centre and subsequently moved to Broadway. The company had previously used Richter's "Last Days" in their acclaimed production of ''Black Watch''.

Richter worked on a project based on Samuel Barber’s ''Adagio for Strings'' and Antonio Vivaldi's ''The Four Seasons'' and made a ballet with artist Idris Khan.

Richter was called upon again by past collaborator Wayne McGregor to score and produce an adaptation of Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy commissioned by the National Ballet of Canada and The Royal Ballet in 2022, wherein his orchestral and electronically produced compositions, both alone and together, help to realize Atwood's dystopian vision.

Other collaborations

In 2010, Richter's soundscape ''The Anthropocene'' formed part of Darren Almond's film installation at the White Cube gallery in London. The composer has also collaborated with digital art collective Random International on two projects, contributing scores to the installations ''Future Self'' (2012), staged at the MADE space in Berlin, and ''Rain Room'' (2012/13) at London's Barbican Centre and MOMA, in New York.

Personal life

Richter met visual artist Yulia Mahr at the Edinburgh Festival in 1988. They began living together, in Islington, London, in 1993 and have three children, born in 1998, 1999 and 2008. They married in 2003. The couple live in Oxfordshire with their children, two black Labradors called Haku (named after the dragon in Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away

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