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Max Richter: Retrospective (Limited Edition) | Deutsche Grammophon 4796309

Max Richter: Retrospective (Limited Edition)

Label: Deutsche Grammophon

Cat No: 4796309

Barcode: 0028947963097

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 4

Release Date: 12th August 2016

This product has now been deleted. Information is for reference only.

Contents

About

“He closes in on reflecting the glowing consciousness of the composer, who is using music to keep alive the idea that there is somewhere to go next, a new place to think, and a new way to listen.” – Paul Morley

CD 1: THE BLUE NOTEBOOKS
On ‘Blue Notebooks’ (2004), Max Richter turns to Franz Kafka’s fragmented ‘Blue Octavo Notebooks,’ a small gnomic book of self-scrutinising ‘thought-experiments,’ unfinished sentences and passing whims for the overheard words of those shadows, perhaps because he would want Kafka to come up with the term that describes his music - ‘innermost’ - perhaps because Kafka is his ideal front man - as long as he sounds like Tilda Swinton, with her particular poise and precision, her talent to perceive – perhaps because he identifies with how Kafka’s words reflect a shaky, tentative, untraceable reality, an inexplicable inner world occasionally illuminated by flashes of startling clarity. Perhaps Richter is looking to Kafka for clues about how to conceal your own tracks, even as you put yourself forward.

CD 2: SONGS FROM BEFORE
On ‘Songs From Before’ (2006), connected by various odd numbered doors and lonely corridors to ‘Notebooks,’ but in another part of space and time, another part of the brain, surrounded by a high brick wall, Richter masks and reveals himself in front of and behind the words of the mind searching, teasing, stretching Japanese meta-fantasist Haruki Murakami, now his ideal front man as long as he sounds like Robert Wyatt, who speaks the words sounding like the end of the world made sublime, the beginning of time made divine, between down to earth and out of this world. Here, Richter’s looking to Murakami for clues as to what kind of person you would be if all your memories were taken away, how would you piece yourself together – and what kind of music would you make if you forgot all the music you had ever heard but somehow sense it? Murakami’s potential term for Richter’s music; the other side.

CD 3: 24 POSTCARDS IN FULL COLOUR
Richter’s next wonderland, his next set of fleeting images, the next retreat from the tangled, exhausted too much into a bare room floating in an open-ended space containing nothing but questions and data decay, longing and shadows, instruments and time, ‘24 Postcards in Full Colour’ (2008), is made up from wondering what happens if ringtones were composed in the belief they could be beautiful, and more radiant Mozart than tinny Muzak. In this room, Richter looks for the connection between making an isolated personal artistic statement, and producing something functional – music to use in an everyday practical way that is also spiritual, sweetly imagining a blunt commercial world that actually contains soul and substance. Melancholy and abbreviated electro-acoustic chamber miniatures fall from the sky, cross the great divide, fill the room, and then disappear, as if they never existed, from and for and about a chaotic, simulated world that’s all around us, blissful, blistered melodies and memories never quite fully materialising before and after a conversation that only makes sense if you are in the right place at the right time. This is almost a science fiction project; imagine a new combination of ideas, a new way of remembering and restoring ideas, and make it so.

CD 4: INFRA
Infra, the fourth room for now, in the same building, but separated by oceans of time, is where Richter responds to, amongst other things, Winterreise, Schubert’s masterful, mournful gothic era song cycle based on Wilhelm Müller’s bleak monodramatic poems set in a brutal winter about a questing, misunderstood wanderer whose heart, and memory, is frozen in grief. It was arranged for a Wayne McGregor ballet inspired by the borrowed fragments of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, and its apprehension of chaos, but the Eliot, the Schubert, the Müller, and the dance - and Kafka and Kraftwerk – are only remotely in the room. They’re memories, rumours, guiding lights, signals, prompts, pulses, a clustering of ideas and situations, a motivation for Richter to work out how to find his own way, how on earth to begin a piece of music, and where to end it, and what it means, the struggle to make something new from an inherited tradition, once it makes it into the room where we all live, now, in a world that’s not quite sure what to do with itself and its collected, clashing memories.

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