Famous British composer Max Richter performed in Tashkent for the first time. What made the concert memorable?

Famous British composer Max Richter has performed in Tashkent for the first time. What made the concert memorable?

British composer and pianist, Oscar nominee (2026) Max Richter has been performing his own music for many years, but he only began organizing his first full-scale world tour in 2024 — coinciding with the release of his ninth studio album, In A Landscape. The tour spanned Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia, with the program continuing into 2025 and 2026.

One of the stops on the route was Tashkent. Max Richter's first concert in Central Asia, which took place at the Palace of International Forums, was organized by the Art and Culture Development Foundation of Uzbekistan.

In an interview with the Mindscape podcast in September 2024, the composer explained that he had previously given many individual performances, but had not yet set off on such a large-scale, sequentially planned tour — almost like a rock band.

"Over the years, we never managed to perform in many places where people wanted to hear our music. There was huge interest in it and in live concerts. Besides, performing live is a wonderful experience for us as well. Every concert is a kind of experiment, a journey of discovery. You learn how a new audience reacts to the music. It's always incredibly interesting, so we decided to take the time to organize everything properly," Max Richter told a Gazeta correspondent before the concert.

On the eve of the event, the composer and his ensemble musicians managed to spend a day in Tashkent, which Richter described as a very beautiful city.

For the current tour, Richter combined two works: The Blue Notebooks, released in 2004, and In A Landscape, presented in 2024.

The Blue Notebooks was created against the backdrop of the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Richter conceived the album as an anti-war statement, also addressing broader themes of violence, memory, and human vulnerability. Its musical language was built from string instruments, piano, electronics, field recordings, and literary texts by Franz Kafka and Czesław Miłosz.

"When I write a piece, my job, in a sense, is to manage what I can manage. Namely, the notes on the page. I can't control anything beyond that. So I focus on them, and then I see what happens," Max Richter said, answering Gazeta's question about how he understands his work.

According to the composer, returning to familiar material helps to find new connections within it, although the music itself inevitably belongs to the time in which it was created.

"I think playing such an old piece is like meeting a former version of yourself. Or even another person, in a way. After all, a lot of time has passed since then. This piece is over 20 years old," he continued.

The album In A Landscape retains Richter's interest in combining acoustic and electronic sounds, but the outlook on the world has changed. In a commentary on the album's release, the composer spoke of a desire to reconcile opposites: nature and the human world, grand ideas and everyday experiences.

Richter arrived in Tashkent with a string quintet. All five musicians — violinists Ben Russell and George Meyer, violist Kal Sugatski, and cellists Clarice Jensen and Zara Hudson-Kozdoj — had previously performed with him at various stages of the tour, although the ensemble's line-up varied from concert to concert. Literary fragments were read by British performer Henrietta Smith-Rolla, who performs under the pseudonym Afrodeutsche. The composer himself played piano and electronics.

The evening's two-part program opened with music from the album In A Landscape. Longer compositions alternated with short sound sketches titled Life Studies, assembled from fragments of everyday life: footsteps, voices, ambient noise, and other overheard sounds. Richter himself, in an interview with The Line of Best Fit, compared these miniatures to Polaroids or snapshots that allow one to pause for a moment and look around before the music moves on.

The stage design was minimalist, yet created a sense of total immersion. Spotlight beams passed through a nearly continuous haze produced by a completely silent fog machine, forming an ever-changing, almost tangible canvas.

It was reminiscent of the Pensieve from Harry Potter — a luminous depth into which one could step to find oneself among their own memories.

During the Life Studies miniatures, orange light patterns were projected onto the dome of the Palace of International Forums. The architecture of the hall became an extension of the scenography, and the listener's gaze could move freely between the musicians, the light, and the space above them.

Only Silent Words sounded particularly expressive. Electronic effects, three-dimensionality, and the fluidity of the sound seemed to disrupt the usual flow of time. It felt as though the music was alternately stretching the moment and letting it slip away.

In the second half, Max Richter presented compositions from the album The Blue Notebooks. Excerpts from Kafka's diaries, performed by Afrodeutsche, served as a kind of interlude between the large musical canvases.

The smoothness of the transitions was particularly impressive. Instrumental performance subtly gave way to the human voice, followed by the next composition. Listeners were left with almost no usual pauses to catch their breath, get distracted, or switch attention. The voice picked up the emotional tension of the music, and the next piece continued it before the impression of what had been heard had time to dissipate. This created a feeling of continuous immersion, where it was difficult to mentally step outside of what was happening on stage even for a moment.

One of the most expressive episodes was Iconography, which Richter performed together with a cellist who took a seat at a second synthesizer. They were positioned opposite each other, at opposite ends of the semicircle formed by the ensemble. A special tension was felt in their interaction: the musical dialogue unfolded across the entire space of the stage.

Interestingly, in a commentary on the album, Richter explained the concept of Iconography through the ability of sound to create an image of an architectural space — in this case, church acoustics. During the Tashkent performance, the positioning of the musicians added another dimension to this idea.

In Arboretum, bell-like arpeggios seemed to stretch time, while the cello melody sounded like a faint memory. A strange sense of déjà vu arose — as if this music was already familiar, even though the most important part was yet to be heard. In an interview with Drowned in Sound, the composer called this piece a kind of pre-echo of The Trees: both compositions are based on a shared harmonic progression. The cello melody from Arboretum later returns in the violin part of The Trees, which brought the concert to a close.

Its performance was the climax of the entire evening. The ensemble's sound gradually densified, the string parts layered on top of one another, and the tension built up. The persistently repeating viola arpeggio was particularly memorable — unsettling yet remarkably uplifting. Toward the end of the piece, it was increasingly drowned out by the lead violins and the rest of the instruments, but it was precisely this relentless movement that seemed to hold the entire musical structure together. The final crescendo proved phenomenal. The last notes dissolved into a standing ovation — the audience applauded the musicians while standing.