Max Richter trained as a thoroughly classical composer, the Royal Academy of Music, then studies with the avant-garde legend Luciano Berio in Florence, before deciding that the concert hall's walls needed doors. His 2004 album The Blue Notebooks, quiet protest music written in the shadow of the Iraq War, became one of the most influential recordings of the century and gave the world On the Nature of Daylight, modern music's signature elegy.
Since then he has recomposed Vivaldi's Four Seasons (the most-streamed classical recording of its era), written Sleep, an eight-and-a-half-hour lullaby performed overnight to audiences in beds, and scored film and television from Ad Astra and The Leftovers to Chloé Zhao's Hamnet. Few living composers have done more to widen classical music's front door.
Underneath the postmodern packaging is an old-fashioned conviction: that music's first job is consolation. Audiences around the world, and now in Brandon, keep taking him up on it.
