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All Music Guide:
Blending classical, electronic, and rock influences into a style he calls "post-classical," composer/programmer Max Richter ignores boundaries in favor of haunting, strangely familiar sounds. Born in Germany in the mid-'60s, Richter and his family moved to the U.K. when he was still a little boy; by his early teens, he was listening to the canon of classical music, as well as modern composers including Philip Glass, whose sound 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. Richter 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, Richter left the group and became more involved in the U.K.'s thriving electronica scene, collaborating with the Future Sound of London on Dead Cities (which features a track named after him) and Isness; he also contributed orchestrations to Roni Size's 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: 2002's Memoryhouse introduced his mix of modern composition, electronica, and field recordings, and the following year's stunning Blue Notebooks -- inspired by Kafka's Blue Octavo Notebooks -- showed off a more streamlined, and more affecting, version of this sound. Released in 2006, Songs from Before paired Richter's plaintive sound with texts written by Haruki Murakami and delivered by Robert Wyatt. Two years later, 24 Postcards in Full Colour, a collection of elaborate ringtones, was released, and 2008 also saw the release of Richter's score for the film Waltz with Bashir. Richter 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 The Last Word. Another scoring project was Infra, which Richter was commissioned to compose in 2008. A ballet inspired by T.S. Eliot's classic poem "The Wasteland," Infra premiered that November at London's Royal Opera House. Richter re-recorded and expanded his music for the 2010 album Infra, his fourth release for Fat Cat Records.
Wikipedia:
Max Richter (born 1966) is a British composer.
Early career [edit]
Richter studied composition and piano at the University of Edinburgh, 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 Arvo Pärt, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Julia Wolfe, and Steve Reich. The ensemble was signed to Decca/Argo, producing five albums.
In 1996, Max collaborated with Future Sound of London on their album Dead Cities, beginning as a pianist, but ultimately working on several tracks, as well as co-writing one track (titled Max). Richter subsequently worked with the band over a period of 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 Mode. Richter produced Vashti Bunyan's 2005 album Lookaftering and Kelli Ali's 2008 album Rocking Horse.
Solo work [edit]
Memoryhouse (2002) [edit]
In 2002, Richter released his solo debut Memoryhouse, an experimental album of "documentary music" recorded with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, which explores real and imaginary stories and histories. It combines ambient sounds, voices, and poetry readings. The album went out of print several years later, but was re-released in 2009. 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 produced by Laurence Rees.
The Blue Notebooks (2004) [edit]
On his second album The Blue Notebooks, released in 2004, actress Tilda Swinton reads from Kafka’s Blue Octavo and other shadow journals.
Songs from Before (2006) [edit]
In 2006, he released his third solo album, Songs from Before, which features Robert Wyatt reading texts by Haruki Murakami.
24 Postcards in Full Colour (2008) [edit]
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.
Infra (2010) [edit]
Richter's 2010 album, Infra, is an extension of his 25-minute score for a ballet choreographed by Wayne McGregor and staged at the Royal Opera House. Infra is composed of music written for piano, electronics and string quintet, the full performance score, as well as material that subsequently developed from the construction of the album. Pitchfork described the album as "achingly gorgeous" and The Independent newspaper characterised Infra 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) [edit]
Richter’s recomposed version of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons was premiered in the UK at the Barbican Centre on 31 October 2012, performed by the Britten Sinfonia, conducted by André de Ridder and with violinist Daniel Hope. Although Richter said that he had discarded 75% of Vivaldi’s original material, the parts he does use are phased and looped, emphasising his grounding in postmodern and minimalist music. The album topped the iTunes classical chart in the UK, Germany and the US.
Film and television work [edit]
Richter has composed numerous film soundtracks. He executed the score to Ari Folman’s Golden Globe-winning film Waltz with Bashir in 2007, supplanting the standard orchestral soundtrack with synth-based sounds. Max Richter also composed music for the independent feature film Henry May Long, starring Randy Sharp and Brian Barnhart, back in 2008. Richter 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 featured throughout the BBC Two two-part drama Dive, which was co-written by Bafta award winning Dominic Savage and Simon Stevens. On The Nature Of Daylight was also featured in an episode of HBO's television series Luck. Richter also wrote the soundtrack to Peter Richardson’s documentary, How to Die in Oregon, and the score to Les Impardonnables (2011) directed by André Téchiné. An excerpt of the song Sarajevo from his 2002 album Memoryhouse was used in the international trailer for the Ridley Scott 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 Max's music released in 2011 include French drama Elle s’appelait Sarah by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, and David MacKenzie's romantic thriller Perfect Sense. In 2012 he composed the scores for Cate Shortland's 2012 Australian-German war thriller Lore and Disconnect, directed by Henry Alex Rubin. Richter is currently composing the score to Ari Folman’s new film The Congress, which is set for release in 2013.
Collaborations [edit]
Richter wrote the score to Infra as part of a Royal Ballet-commissioned collaboration with dancer Wayne McGregor and artist Julian Opie. The production was staged at the Royal Opera House in London in 2008. In 2010, Richter's soundscape The Anthropocine 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.
