The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

Menu

Navigation

You are here: Home / Forum / Is Max Richter Our Greatest Living Composer

Is Max Richter Our Greatest Living Composer

by 33 Comments

Great interview in The Guardian. Max writes simple, beautiful music. His Blue Notebooks is a marvel, Sleep is an incredible piece of work and his reimagining of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is, perhaps, my go-to Classical music of the decade. Whatever he does, and no matter how slow-paced, I’m totally engrossed. His music is nurturing, uplifting and wonderful.

Check out On The Nature Of Daylight

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/aug/02/max-richter-album-exiles

1

Comments

  1. There’s also this very good mash-up by Robbie Robertson of On the Nature of Light with This Bitter Earth by Dinah Washington which he did for the Scorsese film Shutter Island.

    I like Richter, and he is one of the best composers of the minimalist school. It is strange how a style rooted in the obscure Avant Garde of the early sixties has now become so widespread, not only in contemporary classical music but everywhere. For example, Ed Sheerin and buskers in Trafalgar Square use tape loops which Reich pioneered, and repetive synthesizer arpeggios are on lots of dance music. I suppose the most significant figure was Terry Riley with In C and A Rainbow in Curved Air – possibly the most influential pieces of music since The Rite of Spring fifty years, moving away from deliberate complexity to seeing what emerges from simple patterns. He influenced Reich and Glass and they influenced Richter and so many others.

  3. Max Richter is one of a growing number of ‘classical’ composers who are reaching an audience way beyond the core classical audience – and that can only be a very good thing. Anna Meredith is another. Is he our greatest composer? Don’t know – it’s a crowded field even if you stick just to Brits . Thomas Ades and Mark Antony Turnage certainly have a claim but I’d probably go for James MacMillan who if nothing else is one of the true greats of choral music.

  4. Sorry, mild dissenter here…it all brilliant, and sounds amazing, but it simply doesn’t hold my attention. Last year during lockdown when I was sleeping badly I often listened to a Spotify playlist designed to get me off to sleep, and the This is Max Richter Spotify playlist I’m listening to would work equally well for that. Accompanied by awe-inspiring visuals in some epic movie, then maybe.

    Even Mrs thep, whose tolerance for minimalism is way greater than mine (she listens to Ludovico Einaudi, which tells you all you need to know), isn’t completely sold. Doubtless I should dig deeper, but if digging deeper sends you to sleep, what’s a boy to do?

    Points for The Four Seasons, though – that’s a keeper. But then he was collaborating with Vivaldi…

    • More than once I’ve heard Radio presenters say that nothing divides their listeners like minimalism. I like it (usually – there was a Steve Reich counterpoint piece played last Sunday which made me want to hammer nails into my ears), and it’s more likely than much of the playlist to make me pause what I’m doing and lean in to the music.

      • I start off liking the opening ten minutes or so of minimalist music (I feel properly intellectual) then invariably and inevitably I drift off. To my cloth ears most of it, even the sainted Arvo, ends up like something you would listen to in a very posh lift on your way up to a Private Exhibition in a very minimalist penthouse studio where people dressed in black discuss really important things I know nothing about.
        I’m more of a Tap & Spile, Hexham kind of guy – Thursday night, pint of IPA, packet of crisps, listening to my mate Terry murder Born To Run.
        I’m a simple soul.

  7. Well…I have heard The Four Seasons played live (at the Globe, accompanying a gorgeous puppet show), and heard a few more bits of Richter. He’s clearly found a good niche but for me not yet wrote a genuinely influential piece. From the states I would put Reich, John Adams and Reich in that order into the frame. Terry Riley is an interesting case, he’s written a lot of stuff that has not hit the mark, but In C is arguably a more important single work than anything by those 3 (see above(. A more recent riser is John Luther Adams, whose Become Ocean is awe-inspiring. Part has to be in the final four too.

    • I have “In C” on vinyl bought in the 70’s. Pretty sure I’ve never played side 2.

      Max Richter is great IMO. My son played “Written on the Sky” as part of his piano concert last year and I still love it despite having had to listen to it hundreds of times. It seems way to melodic to be minimalist though.

      • Inthe days before CDs and digital files, it was impossible to render “In C” properly except live in concert.
        It had to be cut in two to put it out on vinyl, so if you never got past playing side one then you’ve never heard it as written.

  8. Are there two Max Richters? In 1989 or thereabouts I was heading to Salzburg via Munich with a couple of American friends. We (probably the Americans) somehow got talking on the train to someone who I recall as Max Richter (long hair a bit rock n roll) who was performing/conducting at La Traviata in Salzburg. He invited us to the performance, we went and we met him after for a night out.

    That’s all I recall for now.

    • He would have been 23 in 1989, so I don’t think it’s the same man. In the nineties he worked with Future Sound Of London and Reprazement. He produced Vashti Bunyan’s comeback album. His first ‘classical’ album was released in 2002. He’s been around but I think your timeline is out of kilter.

  13. I am presently engaged upon a couple of small paintings that are as always at the most fundamental of levels about light. I’m listening to Exiles the latest release under Max Richter’s name as I think and paint.
    It’s very beautiful and that helps.

Leave a Reply