Max Richter

Max Richter 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. The music combines ambient sounds, voices, 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 soundtracks of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island and Chloé Zhou’s Hamnet. 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, "." 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, 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 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 Amsterdam; the Sydney Opera House; in Berlin ; in Madrid ; and in London. 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 ", 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.