Fragmentary and clear like glass splinters, Max Richter‘s music fascinates by its endless research.
Born in Germany but raised in the UK, Richter has been, in his early years, member of the Piano Circus ensemble, he collaborated with artists such as The Future Sound of London, Roni Size and Vashti Bunyan, composed soundtracks and worked for artistic installations.
His eclecticism is based on a solid education as pianist and composer. He studied at the University of Edinburgh, at the Royal Academy of Music and with the father of experimental music in Italy, Luciano Berio.
Richter’s musical production doesn’t conceal his own influences, from the American minimalism of Steve Reich and Philip Glass to the sweetness of Arvo Pärt onto electronic music. Richter combines ambient recordings, voices and poetry readings, overlaying the sounds, mixing and splitting them. The result is an extremely delicate and fragile music, just like the memory process. Memory is where his debut album takes his name from: Memoryhouse (2002), recorded with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, directed by André de Ridder. Immediately acclaimed by the critics, Memoryhouse fixed the typical nostalgic quality as his stylistic code of his later recordings.
In 2008 he releases 24 Postcards in Full Colour, an album conceived as a collection of musical miniatures, the longest of which doesn’t exceed 3 minutes. Again, the complex composition that alternates pieces for piano and electronic music tracks, brings us back to the process of memory and thought. The 24 postcards seem like musical sketches that re-emerge from the artist’s past, without any solution of continuity.
Richter often collaborates with the world of art. The album Infra (2010) is an extension of the music realised for a ballet commissioned by the Royal Ballet of London, with the choreography of Wayne McGregor and the scenography of Julian Opie. The composer also worked on the musics of Anthropocene: The Prelude (2010), video of the artist Darren Almond, and on the striking installation Rain Room (2012/2013) of the digital art collective rAndom International.
But it might be Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi, The Four Seasons (2012) where Richter’s talent reaches his climax.
The recomposed Four Seasons preserve the beauty of the original work, they actually invite the listener to rediscover its essence through subtle and intelligent modifications. Richter plays with the listeners’ expectations, aware of the extreme popularity of Vivaldi’s opera, alternating moments in which the sounds thicken and overlap each other with moments of complete stagnation. The minimalistic matrix of Richter’s work finds an unexpected partner in the structure of Vivaldi’s music. Both are actually based on the repetition of a main theme, around which are inserted variations and tonal passages. Deconstructing to re-construct: at the bottom, that’s exactly how memory works.
Francesco Dama
12.02.2014
web: maxrichtermusic.com
