Biography (read more)

Max Richter (born March 22, 1966, in Hamelin, West Germany) is a German-born British composer and pianist raised in Bedford, England, who studied at the University of Edinburgh, the Royal Academy of Music, and with Luciano Berio in Florence. A leading figure of the post-minimalist “contemporary classical” movement, he co-founded the ensemble Piano Circus before establishing a solo career blending orchestral writing, electronics, and ambient textures. His acclaimed works include The Blue Notebooks (2004), the eight-and-a-half-hour Sleep (2015), and Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons (2012), in which he discarded roughly 75% of Vivaldi’s original material and reconstructed the score using minimalist looping and phasing techniques.

Richter is widely credited with popularizing post-minimalist classical music for mainstream audiences, and his Recomposed Vivaldi project in particular helped pioneer the “reworked classics” genre now common in contemporary classical programming; his piece “On the Nature of Daylight” has become one of the most licensed contemporary classical works in film and television.

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Repertoire

November
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Performed by Mari Silje Samuelsen

She Remembers (Official Music Video)
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Fragment (live at teamlab Borderless, Mori Building, Tokyo)
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Dream 1
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On the Nature of Daylight (arr. for saxophone and cello)
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Performed by Hila Karni

Dream 13 (minus even)
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Dream 3 (in the midst of my life)
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Winter 1
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Winter 2
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On the Nature of Daylight
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Love Songs
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Sleep: Dream 3 (in the midst of my life)
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Sleep: Path 5 (Delta)
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Sleep: Dream 13 (minus even)
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Vladimir’s Blues
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Waltz in A Minor, Op. 34, No. 2— Vladimir Horowitz
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Performed by Vladimir Horowitz

Richter: Mercy— Hilary Hahn
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Performed by Hilary Hahn

She Remembers (from The Leftovers)— Gautier Capuçon
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Performed by Gautier Capuçon