Max Richter
National Concert Hall, Dublin
★★★★★
Max Richter has described his new album, In a Landscape, as a response to the polarities that increasingly define our world, as social-media algorithms stoke our anger towards those with different views and politics becomes a game of “them” versus “us”. Its message is that seemingly oppositional forces can coexist, a point he makes by layering electronica and samples from the natural world, juxtaposing found sounds and composed music.
It is a by turns unsettling and calming work, where passages of gentle beauty are followed by harsher moments: Richter is tiptoeing through the woodlands one instant, running from a storm the next.
Those contradictions are grippingly teased out as the German-British neoclassical composer re-creates the album in full with a stunning show in Dublin on Wednesday, the first of two evenings at the National Concert Hall. His performance walks a tightrope with huge skill: there is plenty of melodrama, yet the evening is never preachy or finger-wagging. All Richter is doing is providing a signpost. He isn’t telling us what to do or how we should feel about the state of the world.
Richter, dressed like a software engineer about to give a tricky PowerPoint presentation, is to one side behind a keyboard. Seated opposite are a quintet of players: Eloisa-Fleur Thom and Max Baillie on violin, Connie Pharoah on viola, and Max Ruisi and Zara Hudson-Kozdój on cello.
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Quietly, then urgently, they proceed, beginning with the beatific throb of They Will Shade Us with Their Wings. That leads into the gentle droning of Life Study I and then the descending minimal piano of A Colour Field (Holocene).
As with the original recordings, the pieces are interspersed with samples of nature, the terse, sometimes harsh and jagged strings contrasting with these bucolic burblings. Is Richter, who has written scores for Netflix’s Black Mirror series and the Brad Pitt space opera Ad Astra, seeking to re-create the manic character of the internet – a reliable provider of dopamine hits one moment, a digital hellscape the next – or is he drawing a contrast between the wise, ancient calm of nature and the exhausting hubbub of human existence? The beauty of this recital is that it invites these and other views.
The second half of the evening is given to a re-creation of The Blue Notebooks, Richter’s 2003 “protest record” about the Iraq War, which is built around a series of readings from Franz Kafka, performed here by Sarah Sutcliffe. (Tilda Swinton graced the original LP.)
The Blue Notebooks contains flashes of Philip Glass, Steve Reich and other modern greats of contemporary music. As with In a Landscape, it moves from comforting to ominous while Kafka’s prose paints a picture of a world from which the narrator becomes increasingly detached (echoing the decoupling of politics from reality in the run-up to the disastrously naive toppling of Saddam Hussein).
The centrepiece is a breathtaking The Trees, a cascading number that, for all its blizzard-like intensity, offers the possibility of hope and of better days to come after the darkness. The standing ovation that follows is fully deserved.
Max Richter performs again at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Thursday, October 31st
