The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
My mentor? That would be the milkman
Streamed 450million times, Max Richter’s ‘Sleep’ was a classical music phenomenon. Now he’s ready to wake us up
When I speak to Max Richter using Zoom, he is sitting in front of a bookshelf in his home studio. On it, I can identify only two titles, a huge Beatles volume and a smaller book on Bach – a fitting combination, I suggest, for this 54-year-old Anglo-German composer who bestrides the worlds of contemporary and classical music. Richter laughs.
“That’s the complete Beatles scores,” he says, “literally every note they recorded transcribed by some very eccentric Japanese people.” As for Bach, he says: “My first musical memory as a very small child is listening to Bach with an intuition that there was a governing logic behind those sounds. I found that incredibly exciting. But I loved the Beatles too, and I had the feeling that there was a connection.”
Richter is bespectacled and balding, with the thoughtful, soft-spoken manner of a backroom boffin. During a 25-year career, he has written music for ballet, opera, theatre and art installations, released several mainly instrumental solo albums, and featured on more than 50 film and TV soundtracks, including his scores for Waltz with Bashir, Ad Astra and My Brilliant Friend. But he achieved global fame only five years ago, as the composer who wanted to send the world to sleep.
In 2015, Deutsche Grammophon released Sleep, an eight-and-a-halfhour concept album of what Richter calls “sonic surfaces” – slow, elegant variations on a handful of simple themes performed on piano, strings and synthesisers alongside wordless melodies sung by the soprano Grace Davidson. “I had a sense that the world was getting saturated with data,” says Richter. “So I wrote the piece really as an antidote, a pause button.”
Five years on, Sleep has become an international phenomenon, clocking up more than 450 million streams and more than 100,000 CD sales, and reaching the top of the US classical albums chart. It has been performed live by Richter in marathon overnight concerts around the world, to audiences reclining (and often dozing) in beds. There is now a personalised Sleep app for mobile phones and a documentary film, Max Richter’s Sleep, to be released in September.
“Its success did surprise me,” Richter admits with a slightly bewildered laugh. “I don’t really ever have any expectations that anyone will listen to anything I do. I write the music that I’d like to hear.” He has been struck by the different ways people have responded to Sleep, including those who “go to the office, put it on and when it’s finished they go home”. “It’s the length of a working day,” he says.
Asked about Sleep’s effect on his own life, Richter – who lives “in the middle of nowhere” in Oxfordshire, with Hungarian visual artist Yulia Mahr and their three children – says: “It is nice not to be broke, which was my default position for 25 years.”
This month, Richter releases his first album since Sleep. On Voices, the composer blends his soundscapes with passages from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, read by US actress Kiki Layne and other anonymous speakers in more than 70 languages. More than a decade in gestation, “it started as quite an angry piece,” says Richter, a response to the so-called “Torture memos”, US government documents detailing the use of “enhanced interrogation” during the War on Terror.
“I was slightly dumbfounded by what I was reading, and music has always been a way for me to figure things out,” he says. “But then, as our world has got more and more shouty, I felt that I didn’t want to add to that shouting. So I looked for something positive I could build this piece around, so it might be about the solution rather than the problem. The Universal Declaration came to mind as an obvious cornerstone.”
This is not the first time Richter has incorporated spoken word into his music. His 2004 album The Blue Notebooks features the actress Tilda Swinton reading from Kafka, while musician Robert Wyatt reads texts by Haruki Murakami on
Songs From Before (2006). Yet by taking a text such as the Universal Declaration, isn’t Richter risking presenting statements that are already so well-known as to feel almost banal? “But are the words familiar?” he asks. “Obviously it’s a foundational text in terms of the development of the post-war era and I think most of us know the broad strokes. But there’s a lot of interesting, surprising stuff in there. I feel like it’s a document that’s hiding in plain sight.”
He has made a few alterations. “I have adapted it a little bit, here and there. For example, the first article says people should treat one another in the spirit of ‘brotherhood’, which I’ve changed to ‘community’. That might be considered taking liberties, but it’s an aspirational text, a sort of proposition or provocation, and obviously it is of its time.”
Voices had its premiere in London in February, with a live performance involving 60 musicians, and was recorded immediately afterwards. “It was a stroke of luck to be able to rehearse it, tweak it, perform it and get it in the can before lockdown,” says Richter. “So I have been able to get on with all the mixing and postproduction.”
The music of Voices shares many of the gentle, sonorous aspects of Sleep, with its slow progressions and atmospheric combination of strings with electronica. There is
One of the glories of classical music today is Somm Recordings. Established in 1995 and celebrating its silver jubilee, Somm has concentrated on discovering and rediscovering British composers, while also producing over 300 discs of (among others) Mozart, Beethoven, Janacek, Poulenc and Shostakovich. Its catalogue includes archive material and state-ofthe-art recordings. An archive issue first introduced me to Somm in 2007: possibly the finest recording available of Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony, from the broadcast of a Prom in 1952 with the composer conducting. It also contains a breathtaking account of the same composer’s 1936 cantata Dona Nobis Pacem, its first broadcast performance, again conducted by Williams.
Some recent releases maintain the high and eclectic standards for which Somm is renowned. I wrote here a year ago of Ian Venables, when I had the great privilege of attending the first performance of his Requiem. Somm have recorded it, in a subtle but gripping performance by the choir of Gloucester Cathedral, conducted by Adrian Partington, with the organist Jonathan Hope. The work sometimes departs from the normal Requiem template, the music becoming steadily louder during the last section, Lux Aeterna, and ending on an optimistic note. If you think of new English music as hard on the ear and bereft of melody, Venables will force you to reconsider.
Somm has just issued three discs of British song, two featuring the mezzosoprano Kathryn Rudge. She is steadily establishing herself in the front rank of British singers, as comfortable in the opera house as in a recital of modern song. One is of songs by Hamilton Harty, better remembered now as a leading conductor of the interwar period. Harty’s Irish roots are apparent in some but by no means all of his songs; a predominant wistfulness runs through them that Rudge’s delightfully vintage voice captures perfectly. For those discovering Harty the composer, the interest in the repertoire comes from what it says about his development: most of the songs are Edwardian in date and in flavour, but some are from immediately after the Great War and others from near the end of Harty’s life in the late 1930s, after he was physically unable to continue conducting.
Rudge’s second disc is a revelation – songs by Eric Coates, accompanied (as on the Harty disc) by the pianist Christopher Glynn. Coates is usually dismissed as a composer of light music, which ignores his technical expertise and facility for writing superb, uplifting tunes. One of those, familiar doubtless to everyone, is Sleepy Lagoon, the theme music to Desert Island Discs, written in 1930 and later paired with words by an American, Jack Lawrence. Coates did not raid his shelves of English poetry for words, but worked with various lyricists to construct ballads of the sort typically popular between the wars. He wrote songs to show off the voice of the singer, and Rudge is more than equal to that challenge. Coates always resented the generic distinction between classical and light music, arguing that it took just as much compositional skill to write the latter as it did the former, and if one is not convinced of this by hearing his numerous orchestral achievements, his songs should be conclusive.
Somm have also just released a disc of songs by Arthur Somervell, one of the most respected composers of his generation who is too little known today, sung by the incomparable baritone Roderick Williams. His settings of Tennyson’s Maud and Housman’s A Shropshire Lad owe something to the European tradition, notably Schumann, in a way that Butterworth’s or Vaughan Williams’s settings of Housman do not; but they are more specifically in the mould of Hubert Parry, the finest late Victorian songwriter, and Charles Villiers Stanford, who taught Somervell composition. Maud is a period piece transformed by Williams’s interpretation, and A Shropshire Lad’s settings – the first ever made of these poems – come over as distinctive Edwardian ballads, and none the worse for that.
Four years ago Somm issued a disc of Stanford’s fifth and eighth string quartets, and has completed the series with discs of the first, second and sixth and the third, fourth and seventh, played by the Dante Quartet and none of them ever recorded before. The eight were written between 1891, when Stanford was 38, and 1919, five years before his death. They owe much to Brahms and Joachim and have very much a 19th century feel to them, even up to the last one. The Dante play them with feeling and precision, and show a side to the composer that reaches the depths of his soul, if not of his creativity. It is the sort of music that
Somm has always made a point of bringing before the public, and I believe we are better for it.