Combining the discipline of his classical background with the inventive spirit of electronic music,
Max Richter's work as a producer and composer speaks to -- and frequently critiques -- 21st century life in eloquent and evocative ways. On early masterworks such as 2002's
Memoryhouse and 2003's
The Blue Notebooks, he united his childhood memories and commentary on war's devastating aftermath into gorgeous, aching music; with 2015's eight-hour
Sleep, he challenged the increasing disposability of art and music as well as audiences' ever-decreasing attention spans.
Richter's fascination with the growing role of technology in everyday life was a major theme of releases spanning 2008's collection of bespoke ringtones to the music for a particularly paranoid 2016 episode of the TV series
Black Mirror. Despite the high-concept nature of much of his work,
Richter always maintains a powerful emotional connection with his listeners. 2012's
Recomposed: The Four Seasons, an experimental reimagining of
Vivaldi's violin concertos, topped classical charts in over 20 countries. The emotive quality of his music translated perfectly to scoring and soundtrack work, which ranged from documentaries such as Waltz with Bashir (2008); feature films including
Mary Queen of Scots (2018); television series like
Taboo (2017) and
Invasion (2021); and stage productions including
Infra (2008) and
Woolf Works (2015), both projects with
Richter's longtime collaborator, choreographer
Wayne McGregor.
Richter's mix of modern composition, electronic music, and field recordings was as influential as it was innovative, and paved the way for like-minded artists such as
Nico Muhly and
Jóhann Jóhannsson.
Born in West Germany in the mid-'60s,
Richter and his family moved to the U.K. when he was still a little boy, settling in the country town of Bedford. By his early teens, he was listening to the canon of classical music as well as modern composers including
Philip Glass, whose music was a major influence on
Richter.
The Clash,
the Beatles, and
Pink Floyd were also important, along with the early electronic music scene; inspired by artists such as
Kraftwerk,
Richter built his own analog instruments. He studied composition and piano at Edinburgh University, the Royal Academy of Music, and in Florence with
Luciano Berio.
He then became a founding member of
the Piano Circus, a contemporary classical group that played works by
Glass,
Brian Eno,
Steve Reich,
Arvo Pärt, and
Julia Wolfe, and also incorporated found sounds and video into their performances. After ten years and five albums for Decca/Argo,
Richter left the group and became more involved in the U.K.'s thriving electronic music scene, collaborating with
the Future Sound of London on 1996's
Dead Cities (which features a track named after him) and
The Isness; he also contributed orchestrations to
Roni Size's 2000 album In the Mode.
Richter's own work evolved from the
Xenakis-inspired music of his early days into something that included his electronic and pop influences. His 2002 debut album,
Memoryhouse, introduced his mix of modern composition, electronica, and field recordings. Recorded with the
BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, the album explored childhood memories as well as the aftermath of the Kosovo War in the 1990s and was hailed as a masterpiece. Two years later,
Richter made his FatCat debut with
The Blue Notebooks, which incorporated readings from
Franz Kafka's Blue Octavo Notebooks and Polish writer
Czesław Miłosz by actress Tilda Swinton into dreamlike pieces for strings and piano that touched on the Iraq War and
Richter's early years. Released in 2006, Songs from Before paired his plaintive sound with texts written by Haruki Murakami and delivered by
Robert Wyatt.
In 2008, he issued 24 Postcards in Full Colour, a collection of intricate ringtones envisioned by
Richter as a way to connect people around the world. That year also saw the release of his music for Ari Folman's Golden Globe-winning film Waltz with Bashir. Focusing on electronics instead of a typical orchestral score, it was
Richter's highest-profile soundtrack project to date. He then worked on several other film scores, including music for Benedek Fliegauf's Womb,
Alex Gibney's My Trip to Al-Qaeda, and David MacKenzie's Perfect Sense. Another scoring project, Infra, marked the beginning of
Richter's enduring collaboration with choreographer
Wayne McGregor. Commissioned by the Royal Ballet in 2008, Infra was a ballet inspired by
T.S. Eliot's classic poem "The Wasteland," and the 2005 London terrorist bombings.
Richter re-recorded and expanded his music for the 2010 album
Infra, his fourth release for FatCat Records.
Richter began the 2010s with soundtrack work that included the award-winning scores to Die Fremde (2010) and Lore (2012). The composer reunited with
McGregor for 2012's Sum, a chamber opera based on Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives, a collection of short stories by neuroscientist David Eagleman about the possibility of life after death. That year also saw the release of one of
Richter's most popular albums,
Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi - The Four Seasons. An avant-garde, loop-based reworking of the composer's timeless set of violin concertos, it topped the classical charts in 22 countries, including the U.K., the U.S., and Germany. In turn,
McGregor choreographed a ballet, Kairos, to
Richter's recomposition.
Disconnect, the score to Henry-Alex Rubin's film about the impact of technology on relationships, arrived in 2013. His other releases that year included the score to
Wadjda, which was the first feature-length film made by a Saudi Arabian woman (director Haifaa Al-Mansour); the music to Ritesh Batra's The Lunchbox; and Ruairí Robinson's sci-fi excursion
The Last Days on Mars.
Richter also worked with Folman again on the music to
The Congress, an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's novel The Futurological Congress.
In 2014,
Richter launched a mentorship program for aspiring young composers and wrote music for HBO's The Leftovers, which also featured pieces from
Memoryhouse and
The Blue Notebooks. The following year saw the arrival of
Sleep, an eight-hour ambient piece scored for piano, strings, electronics, and vocals that
Richter described as a "lullaby for a frenetic world and a manifesto for a slower pace of existence." The piece premiered at a Berlin performance where the audience was given beds instead of seats.
Sleep and
From Sleep, a one-hour adaptation, were released in September 2015. The following year,
Richter provided the score to the sci-fi/horror film
Morgan and the disturbingly cheery music for "Nosedive," an episode of
Black Mirror that took the all-consuming nature of social media to extremes. Released in January 2017,
Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works drew from his score for
McGregor's 2015 Royal Ballet production inspired by three of Virginia Woolf's most acclaimed novels. It was followed that May by the soundtrack compilation
Out of the Dark Room. That September,
Richter's Emmy-nominated music for the BBC One drama
Taboo was released.
Richter remained busy on soundtrack work in 2018, with projects including the music for the HBO TV series
My Brilliant Friend as well as the scores to films like
Hostiles,
White Boy Rick, and
Mary Queen of Scots, which won a Best Original Score -- Feature Film Award at the Hollywood Music in Media Awards. For his score to the August 2019 film
Ad Astra, he used plasma wave data from NASA's Voyager Interstellar Mission played by a custom virtual instrument as an element of his compositions. That October, Deutsche Grammophon issued Voyager: Essential Max Richter, an expansive retrospective that included two previously unreleased pieces written for
Sleep.
Richter continued to expand on
Sleep in 2020, first with the documentary Max Richter's Sleep, which premiered in North America at that year's Sundance Film Festival, and later with an app designed to help listeners use the work for focus, meditation, and rest. His other projects that year included contributions to
Rudolf Buchbinder's Diabelli Variations project, music for the second season of
My Brilliant Friend, and Journey CP1919, a work commissioned for the
Aurora Orchestra and inspired by the discovery of the first pulsar star. July 2020 saw the release of Voices, a work combining crowd-sourced readings of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a "negative orchestra" comprising eight violins, six violas, 24 cellos, 12 double basses, and a harp. A decade in the making, Voices included performances by violinist
Mari Samuelsen, the choir
Tenebrae, and solo soprano
Grace Davidson. A second volume, Voices 2, followed in 2021.
Richter additionally collaborated with
Kristjan Järvi and the
Baltic Sea Philharmonic on an album titled Exiles, which included orchestral versions of some of his earlier works. He also released his score for the first season of the television series
Invasion. ~ Heather Phares