His new Vivaldi combined the Baroque master’s work that we all know so well with his own post-minimalism to create a work that is both familiar and new.
It was Richter’s breakaway from the previous manipulations of already recorded material that made his name in this series. Recordings include Music by Maurice Ravel and Modest Mussorgsky recomposed by the DJ and record producer Carl Craig and the percussionist and record producer Moritz von Oswald Matthew Herbert recomposing the 1987 recording of Mahler’s 10th Symphony later composers followed Richter’s example and wrote their own versions, such as Peter Gregson recomposing the Bach Cello Suites for cello ensemble. He was joining a series created by the German recording company Deutsche Grammophon which invited artists to use pre-existing recordings and remix and recompose the pieces. In 2014, though, Max Richter ‘recomposed’ Vivaldi to make us hear it in a different way. Every once in a while, though, a performance has the ability to make us stop and open our ears again. For a while, you couldn’t move on American public radio without being assaulted by Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. They have gravitas.We’ve said it before – some music you can just hear too much. I mean, they are crude in a way, but they are also like someone inventing the wheel. “They have a certain presence and authority about them. “Those are the first-generation synths, and I’ve heard them described as the Stradivarius of the synthesiser,” he laughs. “I wanted to match that flinty, haptic, tactile texture with the electronic elements.” The new record is produced on an analogue mixing desk, with the composer himself playing an early Moog, dating from the seventies. “I love the slight grittiness and earthy feeling that gut strings have,” he says. Richter is enthusiastic about this blend. In this “alternative rendering”, Chineke!, the groundbreaking British ensemble consisting of majority Black, Asian and ethnically diverse musicians, and the brilliant soloist, Elena Urioste, are playing on gut strings and period instruments: the sort that Vivaldi would have heard, and played, in his own time. Experiencing it felt as though we were being catapulted onto another plane, reverberated through the cosmos by this epiphanic soundworld. We hadn’t heard anything like that, ever. When Max Richter’s Recomposed first exploded into our collective ears almost a decade ago, a 59-minutes-28-seconds sonic starburst, the effect for so many people was total.
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