Max Richter

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.

In 1996, Richter 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 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.

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."

Chosen 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 stated 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."

Richter produced Vashti Bunyan's 2005 album Lookaftering and Kelli Ali's 2008 album Rocking Horse.

Richter's solo albums include:

Reviewed by Andy Gill as "a landmark work of contemporary classical music", Max 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 described the album as "a masterpiece in neoclassical composition."

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

He has recorded eight solo albums, and his music is widely used in cinema, such as the score of Ari Folman's animated war film Waltz with Bashir (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.

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 the soundtrack for Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island.

It is also used in episode 3 "Long, Long Time" of HBO series The Last of Us.

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 subsequently developed from the construction of the album.

Pitchfork described the album as "achingly gorgeous" and The Independent newspaper 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."

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.

Discussing the album with NPR Classical in 2017 Richter stated "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."

On the eve of its 2018 re-issue, 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", which is an 8 minutes classical-electronic track based upon the theme of "On the Nature of Daylight".

As of December 2019, Richter has passed one billion streams and one million album sales.

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, 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.