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Max Richter

The Blue Notebooks

Deutsche Grammophon

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Max Richter talks about the making of The Blue Notebooks (Interview)
Max Richter - Richter: On The Nature Of Daylight
FACT: From Studio To Screen: Becoming A Composer
Insight Germany
1 The Blue Notebooks  
2 On The Nature Of Daylight  
3 Horizon Variations  
4 Shadow Journal  
5 Iconography  
6 Vladimir's Blues  
7 Arboretum  
8 Old Song  
9 Organum  
10 The Trees  
11 Written On The Sky  
12 A Catalogue of Afternoons  
13 On the Nature of Daylight (Orchestra Version)  
14 Vladimir's Blues (2018)  
15 On the Nature of Daylight (Entropy)  
16 Iconography (Konx-Om-Pax Remix)  
17 Vladimir's Blues (Jlin Remix)  
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DG releases a new, deluxe edition of Max Richter's The Blue Notebooks to celebrate its 15th anniversary with brand new artwork as well as new arrangements, remixes and a previously unreleased new track. Written in 2003, The Blue Notebooks was originally composed in protest to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and features readings by Tilda Swinton of selections from Kafka's The Blue Octavo Notebooks and Czeslaw Milosz's Hymn of the Pearl and Unattainable Earth.

  • Max Richter's 'Sleep' makes GQ's '10 ridiculously relaxing sleep albums to help you drift off'
    Posted At: August 10, 2023 12:00 AM
    From Max Richter’s Sleep to Marconi Union’s Weightless, these calming compositions are just what you need. A guide to relaxing sleep music to help you drift offGQ's Brit Dawson writes…Everyone has a different routine to wind down before going to sleep. There’s the widely-accepted Good, like a warm bath, reading, meditation, or a little stretch, and the regularly-warned-against Bad, for example, eating late,...
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  • Max Richter announces show to commemorate 75th ann. of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights / THE LINE OF BEST FIT
    Posted At: July 11, 2023 12:00 AM
    Max Richter stands as one of the most prodigious figures on the contemporary music scene, with ground-breaking work as a composer, pianist, producer, and collaborator. From synthesizers and computers to a full symphony orchestra, Richter’s innovative work encompasses solo albums, ballets, concert hall performances, film and television series, video art installations and theatre works.  He is Classicall...
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  • Sydney Opera House is the perfect venue for Max Richter's take on classical music / yahoo
    Posted At: June 4, 2023 12:00 AM
    Max Richter and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra performed at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall on Saturday, 3rd June.  yahoo's Jude Durrant writes….Pianist and composer Max Richter, known for his neoclassical, electronic ambient music, recruited the Sydney Symphony Orchestra to share some pieces from his back catalogue in the Sydney Opera House’s newly enhanced Concert Hall for Vivid LIVE.Arriving...
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  • Max Richter w/BBC Concert Orchestra to open bluedot festival's 2023 return to Cheshire's Jodrell Bank / ABOUT MANCHESTER
    Posted At: April 29, 2023 12:00 AM
    bluedot has unveiled the full line-up for its Thursday Opening Concert, taking place 20 July this summer at Cheshire’s iconic Jodrell Bank Observatory.ABOUT MANCHESTER's Nigel Barlow writes……The evening concert, the introductory first night of the bluedot weekend, will be hosted by BBC Radio 3’s Unclassified Live with Elizabeth Alker, headlined by Max Richter with The BBC Concert Orchestra performing Richte...
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  • The doleful minimalism of Max Richter / The New Yorker
    Posted At: April 10, 2023 12:00 AM
    The New Yorker's Alex Ross writes…..The composer is everywhere on film and television soundtracks, promising that we will dissolve in mist before the apocalypse arrives. Richter’s pieces exude a gentle fatalism, a numbed acquiescence. Don’t worry, be pensive.The film scores of John Williams are beloved by untold millions. Philip Glass’s name is known to a good fraction of the population. Arvo Pärt’s sonic v...
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  • Dark Mofo 2023 will see the return of Max Richter's Vivaldi - Four Seasons and his iconic 'SLEEP' / BOSS HUNTING
    Posted At: April 4, 2023 12:00 AM
    THIS 8-HOUR DARK MOFO CONCERT IS PERFORMED WHILE YOU SLEEPBOSS HUNTING - Chris Singh writes….If you’ve ever watched HBO’s stunning The Leftovers then you may already be aware of the profound brilliance that is Max Richter’s music. The German-British composer and pianist has long been a pioneer in the post-minimalist style of contemporary ambient music and his exquisite works have soundtracked movies like Ad...
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  • Wallpaper* chats with Max Richter about creating a sonic antidote to complex times
    Posted At: March 28, 2023 12:00 AM
    ‘Visual art culture is wide open in a way that classical music, unfortunately, sort of isn't’ - Max RichterHot on the heels of Max Richter’s new album, ‘Sleep: Tranquility Base’, and recently opened multi-arts haven in rural Oxfordshire, we speak to the acclaimed composer about creating a sonic antidote to complex times.Some music glides gently over the skin, Max Richter’s goes straight under it. The German...
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  • BBC Radio 3 presents Max Richter Live: Earth Day 2023 at the Ecology Pavilion in Mile End Park, London
    Posted At: March 28, 2023 12:00 AM
    On 22 April, BBC Radio 3 presents Max Richter Live: Earth Day 2023, in a special concert by world-renowned composer and musician Max Richter.Music offers us ways to encounter other minds and to experience other points of view in very direct ways, and we will need this kind of collective understanding if we are to meet the existential questions which face us. — Max RichterOn 22 April, BBC Radio 3 presents Ma...
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  • With 'World Sleep Day 2023' coming up, Evening Standard chats with the composer for our restless times: Max Richter
    Posted At: March 14, 2023 12:00 AM
    Here’s how to celebrate the natural phenomenon scientists are still trying to understand – and wake up feeling restedes - Syraat Al Mustaqeem and Jessica Knibbs writes……More than 60 per cent of adults around the world are dissatisfied with their sleep. As the days get warmer and the nights get shorter your sleep pattern may be in flux – if it wasn’t already. What better time to snuggle back into a satisfyin...
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  • Just sit back and enjoy Wayne McGregor's 'Woolf Works' three-act ballet spectacle / The Jewish Chronicle
    Posted At: March 6, 2023 12:00 AM
    Do not go along expecting to follow a distinct story – McGregor is seeking to distil the essence of Woolf’s writings in dance formThe Jewish Chronicle's Joy Sable writes…..Woolf Works, Wayne McGregor’s three-act ballet (described as a triptych in the programme) is based on the works of Virginia Woolf and is back on stage at the Royal Opera House for a short run. In it he recreates the themes found in three ...
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  • Max Richter - The New Four Seasons, Vivaldi Recomposed makes a closer listen: Happiest Music of the Year
    Posted At: December 16, 2022 12:00 AM
    A decade on from the release of his mesmerising Recomposed album, trailblazing composer Max Richter returns to the sound world of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Recorded with violinist Elena Urioste and the musicians of Chineke! Orchestra, The New Four Seasons sees Richter create a new version of his Recomposed score for period instruments – using gut strings and vintage synthesisers to create a “grittier, more pu...
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  • Max Richter's Exiles. Rich orchestral textures, vibrant performances, political engagement / Planet Hugill
    Posted At: August 30, 2021 12:00 AM

    Prolific and pioneering composer Max Richter releases his 33-minute work Exiles on a brand new album of the same name on Deutsche Grammophon. The title piece features alongside expansive reimaginings of tracks composed by Richter for a Virginia Woolf-inspired ballet, Fendi fashion runways, Hollywood blockbusters, Golden Globe-winning documentaries, and a record loved by David Bowie. Profoundly moved ...
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  • Rich orchestral textures, vibrant performances, and political engagement on Max Richter's Exiles / Planet Hugill
    Posted At: August 29, 2021 12:00 AM

    Max Richter revels in this exploration of large-scale orchestral textures in tandem with vibrant performances from Järvi and his young orchestra Robert Hugill writes.....Composer Max Richter's latest disc Exiles on Deutsche Grammophon is a collaboration with the Baltic Sea Philharmonic and conductor Kristjan Järvi. Six of Richter's works, some new and some old, all in versions creat...
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  • Max Richter's npr: tiny desk home concert, offers short pieces in two different modes of experience
    Posted At: January 22, 2021 12:00 AM

    NPR's Tom Huizenga writes.....The Tiny Desk is working from home for the foreseeable future. It's the same spirit - stripped-down sets, an intimate setting - just a different space. There's a distinct dissonance between the bucolic setting of this lovely Max Richter Tiny Desk (home) concert and the reality he references after his performance. "Looking forward to the time when gigs can come ba...
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  • Max Richter - Voices makes NPR: Best Music Of 2020
    Posted At: December 4, 2020 12:00 AM

    This week we shared NPR Music's best songs and albums of 2020, lists voted on, politely argued over and presented by our staff, station partners and contributors. Today we're featuring the good stuff from the private reserves. Below you'll find lists of top 10 albums and songs from the members of NPR Music's staff. Robin Hilton - HOST, ALL SONGS CONSIDERED writes; I chew through a...
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  • On global human rights day, BBC Radio 3 unites with 35 EBU stations to air Voices by Max Richter / RadioToday
    Posted At: November 14, 2020 12:00 AM

    BBC Radio 3 is joining with 35 European Broadcasting Union radio stations around the world to air a message of unity through music. They'll make the first ever broadcast of Max Richter's latest work Voices on global Human Rights Day, Thursday 10 December. Including passages adapted from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, VOICES is inspired by the document's opening statement "All human b...
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  • Max Richter's 'Voices' offers a global vision of humanity / 89.9KCRW - Rhythm Planet
    Posted At: September 1, 2020 12:00 AM

    The innovative British-German composer Max Richter recently released his ninth studio album called Voices. A decade in the making, Voices explores mental and historical landscapes as well as universal themes that seem particularly relevant today. The voices of the project come from people around the world who responded to Richter's social media invitation to be a part of the work. They, together with act...
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  • Max Richter's 'Voices' envisions a better world / NPR Q&A
    Posted At: August 1, 2020 12:00 AM

    When thinking about putting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to music on Voices, Composer Max Richter tried to capture the essence of "the world we haven't made yet." Richter has scored soundtracks and had his music placed across film and television, including recent Hollywood movies such as Mary Queen of Scots, Hostiles and Ad Astra. But Richter's also a composer who's not afrai...
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  • Simply put, Max Richter is one of the most successful composers of our time / ABC - Australia
    Posted At: July 31, 2020 12:00 AM

    His music sinks deep into the question not only of who we are, but who we aspire to be. His works have been streamed over a billion times and, perhaps more importantly than that, he is the composer to whom we turn as we try to find truth in this world. His new album, Voices, is just out, and it is a work almost beyond categorisation. Voices started as a small idea ten years ago when Richter composed ...
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  • Max Richter's 'Voices' takes its theme from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights / iNews
    Posted At: July 30, 2020 12:00 AM

    There are enough records in the world already, thinks the ­composer Max Richter. So when he writes music, there has to be a "good reason". So far, those have included the Kosovo War, which he tackled on his debut album Memoryhouse in 2002, the Iraq War, the subject of 2004's The Blue Notebooks, and the 7/7 bombings, on 2010's Infra. 2015's eight-and-a-half-hour concept album Sleep was intended as...
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  • Max Richter uses real voices from across the planet to remind us we need more than ever to become one global family / Louder Than War
    Posted At: July 23, 2020 12:00 AM

    There's not many albums that start with a long dead First Lady reading the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but that scratchy recording of Eleanor Roosevelt still hits a nerve. Over the last decade Max Richter has quietly pulled together this complex and moving piece using chunks of that ground breaking document created in 1948 after the horrors of the Second World War, alongsid...
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  • Max Richter's 'Sleep' now available as an app / Louder Than War
    Posted At: June 30, 2020 12:00 AM

    Max Richter's trailblazing 2015 composition Sleep is now available to download with the launch of a new app. The app enables listeners to reimagine the 8-hour Deutsche Grammophon recording in custom-made musical sessions to help with focus, meditation and sleep which many people will need in the midst of the pandemic lockdown. It brings to a wider audience some of the experience shared by those lucky eno...
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  • Max Richter's eight-hour epic; 'SLEEP' provides an apt soundtrack for lockdown, when hours stretch into the distance / Keep The Faith
    Posted At: April 10, 2020 12:00 AM

    Max Richter's eight-hour epic SLEEP, his ‘lullaby for a frenetic world', returns to BBC Radio 3's airwaves this Easter weekend in a simulcast with the European Broadcasting Union – uniting quarantined nations across the continent in moments of meditative stillness. The BBC will join with broadcasters across Europe and beyond, including USA, Canada and New Zealand, for the live simulcast o...
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  • What do sleep doctors do when they can't fall asleep at night ? They listen to Max Richter's 'Sleep' / HUFFPOST
    Posted At: February 15, 2020 12:00 AM

    We all deal with sleepless nights from time to time ― and yes, that includes experts like sleep doctors. Though having trouble falling (or staying) asleep can be distressing, it may be comforting to know that it's a common problem. According to a 2016 Consumer Reports survey, 68% of Americans struggle with sleep at least once a week. "It's perfectly normal for all of us to have poor sleep or insomn...
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  • Watch new video for Max Richter's 'Vladimir's Blues' / udiscovermusic.
    Posted At: February 11, 2020 12:00 AM

    BAFTA-winning film-maker Yulia Mahr revealed her new video for ‘Vladimir's Blues', from Max Richter's album The Blue Notebooks. The global premiere was preceded by a 30-minute live chat between Yulia Mahr and Max Richter. The film is an artistic response to escalating global tension. ‘Vladimir's Blues' is about fragile beauty and the power of small things to elevate our everyday experienc...
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  • There's something about Max Richter's music that triggers deep emotions / npr: Tiny Desk Concert
    Posted At: January 22, 2020 12:00 AM

    Half way through this performance of Max Richter's achingly beautiful On The Nature Of Daylight, I looked around our NPR Music office and saw trembling chins and tearful eyes. Rarely have I seen so many Tiny Desk audience members moved in this way. There's something about Max Richter's music that triggers deep emotions. In Daylight, which has been effectively used in movies such as Arriva...
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  • Sundance 2020 - offscreen events will host Max Richter's 'Sleep' / But Why Tho?
    Posted At: January 20, 2020 12:00 AM

    Sundance Institute will curate dozens of offscreen events, including behind-the-scenes panels on the art of filmmaking, musical performances and – around the theme of Imagined Futures – a public Bonfire and several extended post-screening conversations (known as IF Screenings), at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival taking place in Park City, Salt Lake City, and Sundance, Utah, January 23 through...
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  • Max Richter to headline London's 'Live At Chelsea Concert Series' / Far Out Magazine
    Posted At: January 13, 2020 12:00 AM

    It has been announced that both Max Richter and The Beach Boys will headline a huge outdoor summer show at the stunning Royal Hospital Chelsea in West London as part of the Live At Chelsea Concert Series 2020 on June 12. Richter, who will be playing his critically acclaimed Recomposed: Vivaldi's The Four Seasons & Three Worlds: Music From Woolf Works, is widely regarded as one of the most influe...
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  • Max Richter's 'Perfect Strangers' theme makes 25YL '5 of the best uses of music in tv'
    Posted At: January 4, 2020 12:00 AM

    Here at 25YL, we love music-so much so that we've just rolled out a music department! But what is perhaps all the more powerful than a great song is when the music in a TV show or film perfectly supplements the action, deepens the emotional stakes, or otherwise just fits so well that it becomes an indelible part of your memory of the film or show in question. Here are a few of the best uses of music in T...
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  • Max Richter - Vivaldi Recomposed makes lifehacker's 'best music for 2019'
    Posted At: December 26, 2019 12:00 AM

    Half of the Lifehacker staff can't work with music on. The other half needs it. Here's what we listened to this year while working on Lifehacker.  Composer, musician, producer, remixer and collaborator extraordinaire, Max Richter Deutsche Grammophon recording; Vivaldi Recomposed, is Richter's unique reworking of The Four Seasons for violin, chamber orchestra and moog synthesizer. The pa...
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  • SLANT Q&A with Max Richter
    Posted At: November 3, 2019 12:00 AM

    NASA's launched its Voyager program over 40 years ago, and since then, sci-fi films like James Gray's Ad Astra have been drawing inspiration from the journey that the program's twin robotic probes have made through our outer solar system. And for the film's post-minimalist soundtrack, influential composer Max Richter actually pulled plasma wave data from the Voyager probes and used it to make music that ...
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  • WSHU 'classical music highlight' presents summer in a different way
    Posted At: May 21, 2019 12:00 AM

    Today Max Richter gives us another way to hear Summer from Vivaldi's Four Seasons with his "recomposed" version, featuring violinist Daniel Hope.  Composer, musician, producer, remixer and collaborator extraordinaire, Max Richter has struck a different sort of chord on his highly acclaimed Vivaldi Recomposed. A unique reworking of The Four Seasons for violin, chamber orchestr...
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  • Max Richter's epic lullaby featured on Radio New Zealand: Sound Lounge
    Posted At: January 19, 2019 12:00 AM

    Radio New Zealand's Sound Lounge brings you a lullaby of epic proportions - Max Richter's Sleep at10:00 pm on 19 January 2019.  It's the German-born British composer's "personal lullaby for a frenetic world" scored for piano, strings, electronics and vocals without words. The public premiere in Berlin was held at former East German Powerplant 'Kraftwerk' and since then Sleep ...
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  • Film Music Magazine interviews Max Richter
    Posted At: December 6, 2018 12:00 AM

    As Hollywood's ranks of film composers become increasingly filled with talent drawn from realms of experimental and alternative music, few of these talents that claim their roots in the past have climbed to their craft's throne like Max Richter. German born and English-educated in music, Richter has prolifically conquered concert halls and scoring stages, segueing between ballets, tone poems and a marath...
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  • Max Richter creates clouds of viols on 'Mary Queen of Scots' / Variety
    Posted At: December 1, 2018 12:00 AM

    Period films always pose a musical challenge: How authentic should a composer be?  For "Mary Queen of Scots" with Saoirse Ronan as Mary Stuart and Margot Robbie as Elizabeth I, composer Max Richter created a fairly modern score to sit alongside 16th-century music. Early-music expert William Lyons was called in to handle the historical material, leaving Richter free to tackle the dramatic score. "I w...
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  • Max Richter who is touring 'Leftovers' score is set for NYC's Town Hall on 'Departure Day' / BrooklynVegan
    Posted At: September 24, 2018 12:00 AM

    Max Richter is a busy man, most recently having composed the score to new film White Boy Rick. He's also currently on tour, playing The Blue Notebooks & Infra, on most dates, but he's got something special lined up for NYC: He'll be playing his amazing, elegiac score for The Leftovers at Town Hall on October 14 with the ACME ensemble. Fans of the HBO series may recognize October 14 as "Sudden De...
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