1. Max Richter arranges, performs, and composes music for stage, opera, ballet and screen.
41 Facts About Max Richter
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Max Richter has collaborated with other musicians, as well as with performance, installation and media artists.
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Max Richter has recorded eight solo albums, and his music is widely used in cinema.
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Max Richter grew up in Bedford, England, United Kingdom, and his education was at Bedford Modern School and Mander College of Further Education.
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Max Richter studied composition and piano at the University of Edinburgh, at the Royal Academy of Music, and with Luciano Berio in Florence.
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Max Richter stayed with the group for ten years, commissioning and performing works by minimalist musicians such as Arvo Part, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Julia Wolfe, and Steve Reich.
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In 1996, Richter collaborated with Future Sound of London on the album Dead Cities, first as a pianist, but ultimately working on several tracks and co-writing the track "Max".
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Max Richter worked with the band for two years, contributing to the albums The Isness and The Peppermint Tree and Seeds of Superconsciousness.
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Max Richter produced Vashti Bunyan's 2005 album Lookaftering and Kelli Ali's 2008 album Rocking Horse.
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Max Richter has said that The Blue Notebooks is a protest album about the Iraq War, as well as a meditation on his own troubled childhood.
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Max Richter released another single, "Cypher", an 8-minute classical-electronic track based upon the theme of "On the Nature of Daylight".
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In 2006, Max Richter released his third solo album, Songs from Before, which features Robert Wyatt reading texts by Haruki Murakami.
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Max Richter released his fourth solo album 24 Postcards in Full Colour, a collection of 24 classically composed miniatures for ringtones, in 2008.
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Max Richter's 2010 album Infra takes as its central theme the 2005 terrorist bombings in London, and is an extension of his 25-minute score for a ballet of the same name choreographed by Wayne McGregor and staged at the Royal Opera House.
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In 2015, Max Richter released his most ambitious project to date, a collaboration with visual artist and creative partner Yulia Mahr titled Sleep, an 8.5-hour listening experience targeted to fit a full night's rest.
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Max Richter released a one-hour version of the project, From Sleep, that contains roughly one shortened version of every "theme" from Sleep and is supposed to act as a shorter listening experience for the Sleep project.
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Max Richter has performed the full-length Sleep live at the Concertgebouw Amsterdam; the Sydney Opera House; in Berlin ; in Madrid ; and in London.
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Max Richter played with members of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble.
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Max Richter has called the album a serious work because of its subject, which has an emotional texture.
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Max Richter has written many film and television soundtracks over the years.
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Max Richter rose to prominence with his score to Ari Folman's Golden Globe-winning film Waltz with Bashir in 2007, which uses synth-based sounds and won him the European Film Award for Best Composer.
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Max Richter scored the independent feature film Henry May Long, starring Randy Sharp and Brian Barnhart, in 2008, and wrote the music for Feo Aladag's film Die Fremde.
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Max Richter wrote the soundtrack to Peter Richardson's documentary How to Die in Oregon and the score to Impardonnables, directed by Andre Techine.
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Films featuring Max Richter's music released in 2011 include French drama Sarah's Key by Gilles Paquet-Brenner and David MacKenzie's romantic thriller Perfect Sense.
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Max Richter again collaborated with Folman on The Congress, released in 2013.
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Max Richter composed the original soundtrack for the HBO series The Leftovers, created by Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta, which premiered in June 2014.
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Max Richter composed the score for the feature film Testament of Youth in 2014.
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In 2016 Max Richter composed the score to "Nosedive", an episode of Black Mirror.
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Max Richter composed all the music in BBC One's drama Taboo, broadcast in January and February 2017.
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In 2018 Max Richter composed music for the films Hostiles, White Boy Rick, Never Look Away, and Mary Queen of Scots.
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Max Richter composed music for the HBO mini-series My Brilliant Friend.
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In 2019 Max Richter scored the film Ad Astra, with additional music by Nils Frahm and Lorne Balfe.
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In October 2021 Max Richter composed the score for the Apple TV series Invasion.
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In November 2024 Max Richter was a guest on BBC's Later.
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Max Richter wrote the score to Infra as part of a Royal Ballet-commissioned collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor and artist Julian Opie.
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In 2011, Max Richter composed a chamber opera based on neuroscientist David Eagleman's book Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.
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Crystal Pite has choreographed a ballet to Max Richter's Vivaldi Recomposed, titled The Seasons' Canon, which premiered at the Opera National de Paris in 2016.
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Max Richter had previously used Richter's "Last Days" in their acclaimed production of Black Watch.
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Max Richter worked on a project based on Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings and Antonio Vivaldi's The Four Seasons and made a ballet with artist Idris Khan.
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Max Richter was called upon again by past collaborator Wayne McGregor to score and produce an adaptation of Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy commissioned by the National Ballet of Canada and The Royal Ballet in 2022, wherein his orchestral and electronically produced compositions, both alone and together, help to realize Atwood's dystopian vision.
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Max Richter met visual artist Yulia Mahr at the Edinburgh Festival in 1988.