Max Richter (; ; born 22 March 1966) is a German-born British composer and pianist. He works within postminimalist and contemporary classical styles. Richter is classically trained, having graduated in composition from the University of Edinburgh, the Royal Academy of Music in London, and studied with Luciano Berio in Italy.
Richter arranges, performs, and composes music for stage, opera, ballet, and screen. He has collaborated with other musicians, as well as with performance, installation, and media artists. He has recorded eight solo albums, and his music is widely used in cinema. As of December 2019, Richter has passed one billion streams and one million album sales.
Richter has been called a "major figure of contemporary music" and his work has been described as "transcending genres" by the former controller of BBC Radio 3, Alan Davey. His 2004 album, The Blue Notebooks, has been called "one of the best classical works of the century". In 2026, he was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on the soundtrack of Hamnet.
Early life and career Richter was born in Hamelin, Lower Saxony, West Germany. He grew up in Bedford, England, United Kingdom, and his education was at Bedford Modern School and Mander College of Further Education.
He had piano lessons and music classes, and at 12 or 13, heard a BBC documentary using the opening to Kraftwerk's Autobahn, which later became the first record he bought. It inspired him to research how to build synthesizers, and led on to listening to artists like Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and Vangelis. At around the same time, the local milkman introduced him to minimalist music by the likes of Terry Riley, Philip Glass and John Cage.
Richter studied composition and piano at the University of Edinburgh and at the Royal Academy of Music, though he had some reservations about the syllabus being focused on a Polish School modernist canon to the detriment of other minimalist works. This led him to study with Luciano Berio in Florence which struck him as "opening a door" to "music which was more various".
Richter became involved in performing minimal and post-minimal music, and co-founded the contemporary classical ensemble Piano Circus. He stayed with the group for ten years, commissioning and performing works by minimalist musicians such as Arvo Pärt, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Julia Wolfe, and Steve Reich. The ensemble was signed to Decca/Argo, producing five albums.
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". He worked with the band for two years, also contributing to the albums The Isness and The Peppermint Tree and Seeds of Superconsciousness. In 2000, Richter worked with Mercury Prize winner Roni Size on the Reprazent album In the Mode. Additionally, he produced Vashti Bunyan's 2005 album Lookaftering and Kelli Ali's 2008 album Rocking Horse. The_Australian, 22 November 2014
Richter released his first solo album in 2002, Memoryhouse, to critical praise, and has produced another eight studio albums since. In 2015, he released Sleep, which has been described as the “most streamed classical record of all time".
Alongside his solo work, he has worked on film and television scores, producing over fifty. In 2022, Richter and his partner Yulia Mahr founded Studio Richter Mahr, a studio and recording space that supports young artists.
Solo work Richter's solo albums include:
Memoryhouse (2002)
During a trip to Lantau island in 1994, Richter saw a gate to an old Zen monastery bearing the inscription "Time does not exist. What is memory?", sparking his interest in memory. Reviewed by Andy Gill as "a landmark work of contemporary classical music", Richter's solo debut, Memoryhouse, an experimental album of "documentary music" recorded with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, explores real and imaginary stories and histories. Several of the tracks, such as "Sarajevo", "November", "Arbenita", and "Last Days", deal with the aftermath of the Kosovo conflict, while others are of childhood memories (e.g. "Laika's Journey"). The music combines ambient sounds, voices (including that of John Cage), and poetry readings from the work of Marina Tsvetaeva. BBC Music called the album "a masterpiece in neoclassical composition". Memoryhouse was first played live by Richter at the Barbican Centre on 24 January 2014 to coincide with a vinyl re-release of the album.
Pitchfork gave the re-release an 8.7 rating, commenting on its extensive influence:In 2002, Richter's ability to weave subtle electronics against the grand BBC Philharmonic Orchestra helped suggest new possibilities and locate fresh audiences that composers such as Nico Muhly and Michał Jacaszek have since pursued. As you listen to new work by Julianna Barwick or Jóhann Jóhannsson, thank Richter; just as Sigur Rós did with its widescreen rock, Richter showed that crossover wasn't necessarily an artistic curse.
The Blue Notebooks (2004)
Named by The Guardian in 2019 as one of the best classical works of the century, The Blue Notebooks, released in 2004, featured the actress Tilda Swinton reading from Kafka's The Blue Octavo Notebooks and the work of Czesław Miłosz. Upon release, Pitchfork described the album as "Not only one of the finest record of the last six months, but one of the most affecting and universal contemporary classical records in recent memory."
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. This album is "more interior in nature" to the previous Memoryhouse, but certain themes are present in both, with the main theme of Memoryhouse played by a cello in "Europe after the Rain", present in "On the Nature of Daylight", this time played by a violin.
The second track, "On the Nature of Daylight", is used in both the opening and closing sequences of the sci-fi film Arrival and on the soundtracks of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, Henry-Alex Rubin's Disconnect and Chloé Zhao's Hamnet. It is also used in episode 3, "Long, Long Time", of the HBO series The Last of Us.
To mark the 10th anniversary of its release, Richter created a track-by-track commentary for Drowned in Sound, in which he described the album as a series of interconnected dreams and an exploration of the chasm between lived experience and imagination.
On the eve of its 2018 reissue, marking the 15th anniversary of its release, Fact named the album "one of the most iconic pieces of classical and protest music of the 21st century." The re-release included a new cover design and several new tracks that were originally composed for the project. Richter also released another single, "Cypher", an 8-minute classical-electronic track based upon the theme of "On the Nature of Daylight".
Songs from Before (2006)
In 2006, Richter released his third solo album, Songs from Before, which features Robert Wyatt reading texts by Haruki Murakami in between strings, electronic sounds and "dream struck piano". It expanded on the minimalist soundscapes of his earlier work. Writing in The Guardian, critic John L Waters awarded it four stars, and described it as "rewarding repeated listening" with its strong melodies complementing its atmospherics. Pitchfork described is as "his most cohesive album to date", commenting on his use of rubato conjuring "an overwhelming emotional tizzy, bouts of rhythmic unpredictably guiding the familiar patterns of Richter's beloved minor triads".
24 Postcards in Full Colour (2008) Richter released his fourth solo album 24 Postcards in Full Colour, a collection of 24 classically composed miniatures for ringtones, in 2008. The pieces are a series of variations on the basic material, scored for strings, piano, and electronics.
Discussing the album with NPR Classical in 2017, Richter said: "People were downloading ringtones at the time and I felt this was a missed opportunity for composers—that there was a space opening up, maybe a billion little loudspeakers walking around the planet, but nobody was really thinking of this as a space for creative music. So I set out to make these tiny little fragments and then, of course, in the poetic sense, the idea of these little sounds carrying objects traversing the planet—I started to think of these as a connection, as a sort of postcard into somebody's life, into their space."
Infra (2010) 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. Richter expanded his score to create a cycle, taking inspiration from Franz Schubert's Winterreisse, T.S Eliot's "The Wasteland" and the works of Wilhelm Müller.
Infra comprises music written for piano, electronics, and string quintet, plus the full performance score and material that developed from the construction of the album. The work consists of eight movements of varying instrumentation. On the theme, Richter described music as a "catalyzer of a thought; a reflection and I hope people will come to that music in that way."
Pitchfork called the album "achingly gorgeous" and The Independent characterised it as "a journey in 13 episodes, emerging from a blur of static and finding its way in a repeated phrase that grows in loveliness".
Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons (2012) Richter's 'recomposed' version of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons, was premiered in the UK at the Barbican Centre on 31 October 2012 by the Britten Sinfonia, conducted by André de Ridder with violinist Daniel Hope. The work is an example of "musical borrowing" as coined by musicologist J. Peter Burkholder, taking something new from an existing piece of music and using it in a new piece. It was put on the syllabus of the French baccalaureate exams in 2019 and 2020, with an accompanying monograph, with the foreword by the national schools inspector stating that musical education "cannot restrict itself to the past".
Richter said he had discarded 75% of Vivaldi's original material, but the parts he kept are phased and looped, emphasising his grounding in postmodern and minimalist music, and leading one critic to quip parenthetically, "(Perhaps you could call Richter a baroque decomposer?)." The album topped the iTunes classical chart in the UK, Germany, and the US. The US launch concert in New York at Le Poisson Rouge was recorded by NPR and streamed.
Over the four seasons, Richter uses various techniques such as adjusting the tempo, changing the rhythm to something less "regimented" than Vivaldi's original, instructing particular dynamics, and changing instrumentation, such as a viola swapped to a cello in Spring 2. Richter has also referred to the musical breaks in the work as "jump cuts", a cinematic term, used in this instance to describe the breaks creating "leaps" or the sense of a "trap-door opening".
Sleep and From Sleep (2015) In 2015, 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. The album contains 31 compositions, most of them 20–30 minutes in duration, all based on variations of 4-5 themes. The music is calm, slow, and mellow, and composed for piano, cello, two violas, two violins, organ, soprano vocals, synthesisers, and electronics. Strings are played by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (Ben Russell, Yuki Numata Resnik, Caleb Burhans, Clarice Jensen, and Brian Snow), vocals are by Grace Davidson, and the piano, synthesisers, and electronics are played by Richter.