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Max Richter
Max Richter’s music is characterized by its delicately textured, cinematic quality. The England-based German’s primarily instrumental landscapes, typically created with dramatic solo piano and traditional string orchestration, cry out for visual accompaniment. No surprise then, that makers of thoughtful indie flicks like Stranger Than Fiction and Waltz with Bashir turn to Richter to pen film scores.
The former pianist in electro forerunners Future Sound of London hooked up with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra on his first album and has since worked with many high-profile artists ranging from Roni Size to Vashti Bunyan. In 2008, Richter was asked to create 25 minutes of music for a Royal Opera House ballet titled Infra. The result of the 34-year-old’s highly praised collaboration with Royal Ballet choreographer Wayne McGregor formed the basis of his fifth solo, which includes the full Infra score in addition to material developed during the recording sessions.
Inspired by the theme of travel and Schubert’s epic Winterreise, Richter’s score does indeed play out like a great journey. Yet his path doesn’t stray too far from the motifs we’ve heard on previous stellar albums, such as The Blue Notebooks and 24 Postcards in Full Colour—aside, that is, from an unsparing use of electronic glitches that crackle like distant shortwave radios.
This repetitive musical voice is not necessarily a bad thing. Appropriately, Infra is the Latin word for “below.” Richter’s haunting style is less about pushing boundaries than about diving deeper and deeper into a dark pool of astonishing beauty.
