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Stories   >   Max Richter's 9th studio album 'In A Landscape' is ABC - Classic 'Featured Album'

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Max Richter's 9th studio album 'In A Landscape' is ABC - Classic 'Featured Album'

Posted: October 18, 2024

Max Richter is one of the most influential and acclaimed composers of all time. His fusion of classical technique and electronic technology, heard across genre-defining solo albums and countless scores for film, dance, art and fashion, has won him legions of fans around the world and blazed a trail for a generation of musicians.

His ninth solo album – the first to be written and recorded at his serene new studio in rural Oxfordshire – is a fleeting self-portrait of a musician in constant motion. In A Landscape is a record about “reconciling polarities,” as Richter puts it, bringing together the electronic and the acoustic, the human and the natural world, the big questions of life and the quiet pleasures of living.

The 19-track album began life in summer 2022 as a natural counterweight to the urgent political tenor of his previous projects: Exiles, a ballet score about the refugee crisis, and Voices, constructed with a “negative orchestra” and hundreds of readings of the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights. Richter’s ongoing commissions, meanwhile, were similarly dramatic and conceptual, including a ballet adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s post-apocalyptic MADDADDAM, music for a Mark Rothko retrospective, and scores for Johan Renck’s sci-fi drama Spaceman and the Elisabeth Moss spy thriller The Veil.

The next project called for a recalibration. Shifting focus to Richter’s immediate surroundings, In A Landscape marks out a psychic space in which to meditate on the present while recognising a lifetime of artistic influence, from Bach and Purcell to the poetry of Keats, Wordsworth and Anne Carson. “It’s me having a look around, trying to examine where I'm at,” he suggests, “like a memoir of the present moment.”

In A Landscape is his first solo album recorded at Studio Richter Mahr, the minimalist, eco-conscious creative retreat designed and operated by Richter and his wife, visual artist Yulia Mahr. “The whole building is like an instrument,” he says. “There's an element of exploring the capabilities of the building, how all the spaces sound, all the textures, and trying to dicover the fingerprint it has.”

The creative process was deliberately minimal, with Richter writing notation by hand and restricting his palette to just a few colours: string quintet, grand piano, Hammond organ and MiniMoog, plus tape delays, vocoders and reverbs. “I’m always looking for ways to get to the essence of things, to get to the simplest version of everything.”

ABC - Classic writes…..Max Richter presents his 9th studio album 'In A Landscape'. A record about “reconciling polarities"; bringing together the electronic & the acoustic, the human and the natural world, the big questions of life and the quiet pleasures of living.

"A memoir of the present moment”. In his own words, Max describes the music on the record as being about “connecting or reconciling polarities. the tracks themselves are, as ever, my attempts to figure out how to make sense of our lives in the here and now of our daily life as I experience it.” One of the most influential and acclaimed composers of all time, Max's fusion of classical technique and electronic technology, heard across genre-defining solo projects, countless scores for film, dance, art and fashion, has won him legions of fans world-over, & blazed a trail for a generation of artists.

Artists
Max Richter (piano), Max Richter (hammond organ), Max Richter (synthesizer programming), Eloisa-Fleur Thom (violin), Max Baillie (violin), Connie Pharoah (viola), Max Ruisi (cello), Zara Hudson-Kozdoj (cello), Martin Robertson (bass clarinet), Paul Richards (bass clarinet), David Fuest (clarinet), Martin Williams (tenor saxophone), Graeme Blevins (tenor saxophone), Gemma Moore (baritone saxophone)

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