Max Richter – In a Landscape

Someone once told me that they would like to inject the music of Max Richter into their veins. It’s an apt metaphor: Richter’s music, slow, simple and repetitive, is to contemporary classical music what heroin is to happiness. Without endorsing the use of heroin (though I’ll knock nothing till I’ve tried it), I genuinely mean that as a compliment: music doesn’t always have to be hard work, and Richter’s latest offering, ‘In A Landscape’, feels like the opposite of work.

One thing that separates Richter from many of his contemporaries is his efforts to keep held the thread between postminimalism – that subgenre of classical music which trades in repeated motifs, legible chord changes and stripped-back instrumentation, often with electronic elements peppered amongst the pianos and strings – and so-called high culture, whether that’s the writings of Virginia Woolf or the music of Vivaldi. He’s also made an effort to integrate politics into his work, as visitors to Bluedot Festival last year will have seen when Tilda Swinton read excerpts from the Universal Bill of Human Rights over his piece ‘Voices’. This time Richter turns to the Romantics: Keats and Wordsworth are cited as influences for ‘In A Landscape’, along with contemporary Canadian poet Anne Carson, giving the album a less obviously political bent.

In fact, where much of Richter’s music tends to turn outwards, this album clearly feels like an exercise in introspection. Ten pieces are interspersed with nine ‘Life Studies’, snippets of field-recorded sound that range from someone practising Mozart on the piano to the muffled noise of industrial machinery, and that give the same sense of semi-distant mundanity as the distorted samplescapes made by James Leyland Kirby as the Caretaker. The pieces themselves are no radical departure from Richter’s usual sound, but the Life Studies have the curious effect of making the music they bookend feel more intimate – a clear demonstration of how tuned-in Richter is to the effects of musical context.

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The context invoked here is locational, too, in the form of Studio Richter Mahr – a creative retreat in Oxfordshire run by Richter and his wife Yulia Mahr. Retreats like this often seem to nudge artists towards an embrace of simplicity, and it’s a delight to listen to the ways in which Richter almost revels in removing as many elements as possible from his music, pruning it back to the basics of melody and harmony. ‘A Colour Field (Holocene)’ is essentially a single piano theme, repeating with a few small variations over two and a half minutes, never deviating from a course that feels as natural and comforting as that of a river. ‘And Some Will Fall’ similarly focuses on one timbre, in this case strings, with slow, focused arpeggios moving the piece through a much longer timescale of eight minutes, time which gives the music as much space as it needs to grow and subside without needing to evolve into anything markedly different. Even fuller-feeling pieces like ‘Late And Soon’ straddle two different kinds of simplicity: the mathematical beauty of Bach’s fugues is ever-present here, as is the cyclical, swaddling motion of Barber’s ‘Adagio For Strings’.

And that’s Max Richter’s great talent on this record, as anywhere: his music is almost swaggeringly economical, a proud exercise in doing as much as emotionally bearable with as little as possible. Nothing about ‘In A Landscape’ is new in that sense, although it’s possible that Richter goes further with his minimalist principles here than he ever has before. Excluding the rare occasion when he drifts into mawkishness – ‘Andante’ is a wordless pop song that sounds rather too much like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Close Every Door’ – this is another delicately poised suite of loveliness, and a welcome ode to the simple act of listening. Inject it into your veins if you must – or just lie back and let it wash over you.

8/10

Words: Tom Kingsley

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