Let’s all stop scrolling for a minute, let’s shut down the blizzard of data and listen for a while.

This much is true: Max Richter is a composer. Things then get a little hazy. Does he write classical music? Sometimes. There’s an opera and a couple of ballets in there, among other things. He writes soundtracks, too. He did an episode of Black Mirror and composed the music for the outstanding animated film

Waltz With Bashir. He helped resurrect the career of folk singer Vashti Bunyan and has worked with cutting-edge dance acts.

Richter’s sparse, ambient music has been called post-minimalist but he’s not interested in such labels: “I’ve always thought those sorts of boundaries were a conspiracy of marketeers,” he says. “People don’t listen in terms of categories, they pursue the things they love and things that intrigue them.”

However you describe it, people certainly love Richter’s music; he’s among the most in-demand and popular composers of our age. Now, in something of a coup, he brings three works to Auckland Arts Festival which has offered the composer a residency that comprises a lecture and two concerts.

The first performance features his music-asart-installation epic Sleep; the second pairs one of Richter’s best works, Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works, with his best-known,

Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi — The Four Seasons.

Whatever Richter is now, he started in the classical world. After graduating from the Royal College of Music, he studied with Luciano Berio, a composer whose work ran the gamut from violent brutality to serene beauty, often in the same piece or even the same bar. Berio’s influence is subtle but it’s there in Richter’s compositions.

“A piece like Recomposed is absolutely a Berioesque proposition; it’s a trip through an existing work trying to discover new things in it, illuminating aspects of it. My language and Vivaldi’s coexist in a very Berio-ish sort of way.”

Richter, though, has largely shed the dissonance that punctuates some of his teacher’s most celebrated works.

“Dissonance has been interesting for me,” says Richter. “When I came out of the conservatory I was writing [famously difficult composer Brian] Ferneyhough-style, incredibly complicated music. It was all very satisfying and everything but I really feel that music is a way for us to communicate, it’s a social project and ultimately, I wanted to be understood as much as I could. That meant radically simplifying my language.” Richter has been criticised for that simplicity. Gramophone magazine, for one, described Recomposed as “pleasant-sounding but essentially faceless”. Richter’s many fans care not a jot and, reflecting the composer’s desire to be understood, they aren’t just classical aficionados.

“We find he appeals to a broad audience,” says Roger

Marbeck, owner of legendary Auckland music shop Marbeck’s. “He’s given the music scene a huge boost and brought something fresh to the classical world.”