Famous composer Max Richter will perform his music in Uzbekistan for the first time. What you need to know about him before the concert in Tashkent

Famous composer Max Richter will perform his music in Uzbekistan for the first time. What to know about him before the Tashkent concert

On October 27, a concert by British composer Max Richter, organized by the Art and Culture Development Foundation of Uzbekistan, will take place at the Palace of International Forums. Richter is a European Film Award laureate and an Academy Award nominee.

An ensemble under his direction, which includes five string musicians, as well as classical and electronic music composer and producer Henrietta Smith-Rolla (Afrodeutsche), will perform works from two of Richter's studio albums: The Blue Notebooks (2004) and In A Landscape (2024).

Artur Khafizov talks about the composer who connects modern classical music with electronics and writes for cinema and ballet.

Max Richter was born in 1966 in Hameln, Germany, but spent his childhood in Bedford, England. As a child, he learned to play the piano, and as a teenager, he discovered the German electronic band Kraftwerk. Hearing the composition Autobahn on television made such an impression on him that he wanted to understand how such sounds were created. Synthesizers were too expensive at the time, so the future composer built an instrument himself using ready-made schematics — his father taught him how to solder.

Richter studied composition at the University of Edinburgh and the Royal Academy of Music in London, and then studied under Luciano Berio in Florence. His creative method combined working with the score and electronic experimentation with sound: long-held passions found their place. "I started composing because I love music of all kinds," he said in an interview with The Guardian.

After his studies, Richter became a co-founder of Piano Circus, an ensemble of six pianists that performed music by minimalist composers Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Arvo Pärt. The repertoire also included his own compositions. He reached his solo debut in 2002 with the release of Memoryhouse, an album recorded with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.

Max Richter's music is usually classified as modern classical, but its audience has long expanded beyond concert halls. On YouTube, a recording of his performance for the Tiny Desk project has gathered more than 1.6 million views.

Even a listener unfamiliar with Richter's albums may well have already heard his music in the movies. On the Nature of Daylight, one of his most recognizable compositions, was featured in Martin Scorsese's *Shutter Island* and Denis Villeneuve's *Arrival*, and later appeared in the HBO series *The Last of Us*. When Richter performed On the Nature of Daylight at Tiny Desk, the author of the NPR piece noticed tears in the audience and wrote that he had rarely seen listeners so moved.

A large part of his work is also music for dance. The composer has collaborated multiple times with choreographers and ballet companies, including Wayne McGregor and The Royal Ballet in London.

His rework of Vivaldi's *The Four Seasons* also made it to the ballet stage. In the album Recomposed: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons (2012), Richter literally deconstructs and reassembles one of the most recognizable works of the classical repertoire: the source material either sounds almost entirely intact or dissolves into separate fragments and harmonic outlines. A few years later, choreographer Crystal Pite used this music in the ballet *The Seasons' Canon* for the Paris Opera.

Richter has also experimented with the very way music is listened to.

He called Sleep (2015) an "eight-hour lullaby." At overnight Sleep concerts, the musicians played until dawn, and instead of seats, listeners were offered beds in which they could get comfortable and fall asleep.

In 2015, a performance of Sleep on BBC Radio 3 set a Guinness World Record for the longest live broadcast of a single musical work: it lasted 8 hours, 1 minute, and 23 seconds. One can explore this sound world without an overnight marathon as well — for instance, through Dream 3 (in the midst of my life).

Richter's signature is recognizable in cinema, ballet, and his solo recordings alike.

He takes a short melody and gradually changes its surroundings: another instrument enters, the harmony shifts, the sound builds up.

With each return, the familiar motif feels slightly different. Piano and strings coexist with electronics, literary texts, and sounds of daily life — a musical story is formed from all of this. This signature also unites the two albums Richter will present in Tashkent: The Blue Notebooks and In A Landscape.

The starting point for The Blue Notebooks was the build-up to the war in Iraq. The events raised doubts in Richter that led him to the texts of Franz Kafka. Kafka's notebooks gave the album its name, and excerpts from them, along with works by Czesław Miłosz, are read by Tilda Swinton in the recording — in Tashkent, her "parts" at the concert will be handled by Afrodeutsche. Through these texts, Richter reveals more personal feelings of being lost, uncertain, and vulnerable against the backdrop of a major political conflict.

Released in 2004, The Blue Notebooks became Richter's second album. As the composer recalled in an interview with the music publication Drowned in Sound, his debut Memoryhouse went almost unnoticed, and there was barely enough money for the next work. The strings and piano had to be recorded in a single day, and Swinton agreed to a token fee.

However, in the year of its release, the music publication Pitchfork called The Blue Notebooks "one of the most affecting and universal modern classical records in recent memory." Later, in 2019, the British newspaper The Guardian ranked the album 21st among the 25 best classical music works of the 21st century.

Richter's ninth studio album was released on September 6, 2024. He described the concept as a "connecting or reconciling of opposites": acoustic and electronic sound, the human and natural worlds.

Between the piano and string compositions are nine short sketches called Life Studies. They feature the sounds of footsteps in the forest, the sizzling of eggs in a pan, the squeak of a cart at Hong Kong Airport, and Mozart being played on the piano. From these everyday sounds, Richter constructs his own diary.

The album In A Landscape topped the UK's Official Classical Artist Albums Chart and received an 8 out of 10 from Clash. A reviewer for Pitchfork noted the final composition, Movement, Before All Flowers, for its bright, hopeful sound.

With the release of In A Landscape in 2024, Richter embarked on his first world tour, combining the new album with The Blue Notebooks. In 2026, the tour with this program continues. Tashkent will be one of the stops. At the concert at the Palace of International Forums, audiences will be able to hear how two different stories by the same author emerge from the same strings, keys, and everyday sounds.