He is one of the best-known composers of his generation, and Max Richter’s incursions into stage, opera, ballet and screen – he has composed scores for Waltz with Bashir, among other films and, more recently, the Apple TV+ series Invasion – has given the German-born, British-raised artist a wide-ranging orbit. Sleep, his meditative, eight-hour studio album released in 2015, inspired by Mahler and intended as a soundtrack for somnolence, is officially the most-streamed classical album of all time. As the kids might say, Beethoven could never.
Still, Richter’s output has never been about gimmicks. While he has dipped in and out of genres with a seemingly genuine curiosity – he has worked with everyone from the drum-and-bass collective Roni Size & Reprazent to the folk luminary Vashti Bunyan – he has similarly never flinched from making a statement. The Blue Notebooks, from 2004, was his protest against the invasion of Iraq a year earlier, while Exiles, his 2021 ballet score, documented the refugee crisis.
His ninth studio album takes a less overtly political stance. Instead, In a Landscape is, in his own words, more concerned with “reconciling polarities”, in this case between electronic and acoustic, personal ruminations and bigger questions, and the human and natural worlds. With such themes at the forefront, it comes as no surprise that this is the first album he has recorded at Studio Richter Mahr, the sleek, ecoconscious studio he built with his wife, the artist Yulia Mahr.
The numerous Life Study interludes that punctuate the tracklist are testament to Richter’s determination to insert the everyday into his work, whether it’s the crunch of leaves underfoot, the chatter of a family gathering or the patter of rain on a windowpane.
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There is an undeniably mournful tone to many of these compositions. They Will Shade Us with their Wings is a suitably lugubrious scene-setter hung on piano and strings; the elegiac cello on And Some Will Fall is satisfyingly resonant; Late and Soon is beautifully pitched and paced, while the metallic lurch amid the soft burble of Only Silent Words is tenderly jarring. Elsewhere, the delicate piano-playing of A Colour Field (Holocene), which could pass for a lost Radiohead song, shows why Richter has become such a superstar among Gen X and millennials.
It’s not all doom and gloom. The dancing strings of The Poetry of Earth (Geophony) are a delight, and both the woodwind-led A Time Mirror and the cinematic elegance of Love Song (After GE) lift spirits before Movement, Before All Flowers ends the album on a wistfully hopeful note. As with much of his previous work, Richter strikes a pleasing equilibrium between music to admire and music to enjoy.
