Max Richter: the composer who crosses the divide between ‘high’ and ‘low’ music
Max Richter, the German-born British composer, has seen his work become both ubiquitous and contested. He earned his first Oscar nomination this year for the score to Hamnet, a film that also reuses his On the Nature of Daylight—the same piece blamed for the 2016 disqualification of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Arrival score.
Last year Richter’s 2015 album Sleep surpassed 2bn streams, he received a CBE, and his music will be honoured with the Berlinale Camera and a streamed ballet inspired by Virginia Woolf. Richter’s background helps explain his wide reach. Born in Hamelin and raised in Bedford, he encountered minimalist music as a youth when a milkman began delivering records by Terry Riley, Philip Glass and John Cage; the experience was, in his words to Die Zeit, an epiphany.
Germany, United Kingdom, Hamelin, Bedford