Max Richter, In A Landscape (Decca)
I often gripe about the paucity of Geneva’s live music scene (with honourable mentions to cave12 and AMR), but I can’t really complain when a composer of the stature of Max Richter turns up to give the world première of his new album, In A Landscape, at the Grand Théâtre de Genève opera house. I’ve been a fan of Richter’s work ever since I first heard his score to one of the finest and most underrated TV series of all time, The Leftovers. Since then I’ve grown to love his autumnal, electronica-fused take on minimalism, with 2004’s The Blue Notebooks, and in particular its most famous piece “On The Nature of Daylight”, being a firm favourite. When the La Bâtie festival in Geneva announced that the concert would consist of two halves, the first consisting of In A Landscape and the second The Blue Notebooks, it was a no-brainer to attend. More on the concert in a moment.
The cover of In A Landscape depicts a hand resting on a small pile of well-thumbed paperbacks, one of them bookmarked with tatty old Post-It notes. If the image slyly refers back to Richter’s 2004 masterpiece (notes in books, perhaps), it’s a connection made explicit by the record itself, which inhabits a similar musical landscape to the earlier album while creating a luminous and seductive soundworld of its own. There aren’t the spoken word elements this time, but I was never a fan of Tilda Swinton’s contributions to The Blue Notebooks anyway.
Insofar as In A Landscape has a theme, it seems to focus on the tension and interplay between the human and natural worlds. The album has a rigorously formal structure, its ten fully realized instrumental pieces alternating with nine brief interludes called “Life Studies”. These latter pieces combine field recordings and ambient sound effects – footsteps, machinery, birdsong – with half-buried electronic textures. Lurking in the background like momentary apparitions, the “Life Studies” bring an uneasy sense of the material and physical to the record.
As for the instrumental pieces, they contain all the things that make Richter’s music so compelling – an exquisite, icy minimalism etched in sombre piano melodies and slowly developing string arrangements. Album opener “They Will Shade Us With Their Wings” unfolds over eight sublime minutes, its heavenly sonorities augmented by deep sighs of organ, saxophone and clarinet. Those instruments only appear on one other track, the crepuscular “A Time Mirror (Biophony)”, this time without the piano and strings – an absence that shores up Richter’s avant-garde leanings even as it situates the composer within the desolate fields of post-rock and Isolationism.
Fans of “On The Nature of Daylight” will find much to enjoy in “And Some Will Fall” and “Late And Soon”, two big production numbers that see violin and viola slide gorgeously over dark cello tones. At times recalling the tragic intensity of Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic, these pieces are almost unbearably moving. Indeed the record as a whole feels like an appeal to transcendence, a quiet but firm insistence upon the need for reflection and contemplation in a turbulent world.
As noted above, it was something of a coup for the La Bâtie festival to secure the world première of In A Landscape, which was also the opening night of Richter’s first world tour. I’d only been to the Grand Théâtre de Genève once before, to see Daniele Finzi Pasca’s extraordinary production of Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach in 2019 (also part of La Bâtie). It’s a splendid auditorium, its ceiling spectacularly decorated with over 1000 starlike lights. And the acoustics, as you would expect, are perfect. Somewhat surprisingly, the seating was Freie Platzwahl, which enabled me to secure a front row seat (having arrived at the venue an hour or so before the doors opened).
Alternating between a grand piano, a Roland synth and a Macbook, Richter led his superb string quintet through full performances of In A Landscape and The Blue Notebooks. Except that the latter wasn’t quite complete, as its closing piece “Written on the Sky” (a solo piano arrangement of “On The Nature of Daylight”) was omitted. This would surely have been an obvious encore, but it wasn’t to be.
Also, I’m no expert on the niceties of classical music etiquette, but it seemed a mite churlish of Richter not to introduce the members of his string quintet, all of whom also play on the new album. Maybe it’s not the done thing at classical music concerts, but I would have thought Richter had sufficient crossover appeal to enable the rules to be relaxed somewhat. He certainly didn’t seem too bothered about a formal dress code, as his T-shirt and trainers bore witness. For the record, then, the group consisted of Eloisa-Fleur Thom and Max Baillie on violins, Connie Pharoah on viola and Zara Hudson-Kozdoj and Max Ruisi on cellos. How many other groups can boast three people called Max, I wonder.
The concert was briefly enlivened by some fairly loud onstage feedback, the source of which was eventually located and addressed. Although unintentional, this got me thinking that there’s a seam of dissidence running through Richter’s work that could be suited to a more oppositional approach to performance. I’m reminded of something Michael Nyman (sorry for name-dropping) said to me after a concert of his in Vienna years ago. I mentioned to him that I’d overheard a couple of old ladies complain to the sound engineer that the sound in the room was too loud. “This should be so much louder” was Nyman’s casual reply. It would be intriguing to see Richter embrace noise and volume in live performance, but I’m not holding my breath.
Finally, I was lucky enough to catch Richter outside the stage door after the concert, and got my copy of The Blue Notebooks signed. A memorable end to a hugely satisfying evening.
