With his first album, Memoryhouse, released
on the BBC’s Late Junction, the pianist and composer
Max Richter presented an interesting take on modern
classical music by confronting traditional orchestration
with field recordings and electronics, producing the
fascinating and often melancholic soundtrack to a journey
through the twentieth century. Recorded with The BBC
Philharmonic Orchestra, Memoryhouse told, according
to Richter, ‘a story about where we have been'
and asks the question: 'Where are we going?', a theme
that appears to run through his life.
Born in 1966 in Germany, Richter moved to Britain with
his parents while still a child, spending his formative
years studying composition and piano at Edinburgh University,
the Royal Academy Of Music and with avant-garde Italian
composer Luciano Berio in Florence. Richter later on
co-founded the much-acclaimed Piano Circus, a six-pianists
ensemble formed in 1989 to perform Steve Reich’s
Six Pianos composition. For the next ten years,
Richter worked with Piano Circus on pieces by Arvo Pärt,
Brian Eno or Philip Glass to name but a few, expanding
the sonic landscape of the ensemble by introducing some
elements of live sampling, and consequently developed
an interest for analogue electronic instruments that
led to a collaboration with Future
Sound Of London on Dead
Cities, and on the duo’s more recent
The Isness.
Recorded with a smaller formation than Memoryhouse,
The Blue Notebooks, released on Fat-Cat’s
off-shot label 130701, features Richter’s regular
collaborators Louisa Fuller and Natalie Bonner (violin),
John Mecalfe (viola), and Chris Worsey and Philip Sheppard
(viola). The album also features regular interventions
from British actress Tilda Swinton, who starred in films
such as Orlando, The Garden, Vanilla
Sky or The Beach. Swinton appears on a
number of tracks, reading excerpts of literary texts
lifted from Frank Kafka’s The Blue Octavo
Notebooks and Polish author Czseslaw Milosz’s
Hymn Of The Pearl and Unattainable Earth.
These vocal interventions, underlined by a recurring
typewriter in the background, act as diary entries,
defining some breathing areas around the compositions,
adding to the melancholy of the work.
Although the melodies and orchestrations appear minimal
and bare of any frivolities, the addition of discreet
environmental sounds, mostly recorded around London,
give this album an incredible range of textures and
depth. As these develop in the background, the main
musical themes carry the dense emotional structure of
this record, creating once again a cinematic piece of
work. If the mood is tainted with melancholy all the
way through, each track works on its own level. From
short piano compositions such as the title track, Horizon
Variations or the stunning Written On The Sky,
which brings this album to a close, to more orchestral
moments (On The Nature Of Daylight, The
Trees) and hybrid compositions (Shadow Journal,
Iconography, Arboretum), Richter applies
a variety of emotions, altering the general ambience
of the album slightly.
The Blue Notebooks is the impressive follow-up
to a very promising debut. As a composer in full control
of his art, Richter demonstrates great maturity at crafting
perfect melodies and appropriate arrangements. The addition
of found sounds and electronics could appear either
too obvious or totally out of place, yet Richter integrates
them perfectly and they become complete part of the
orchestrations. This album is simply a masterpiece.
4.8/5 |
