Italian summer for one of the acknowledged champions of contemporary classical music.

di Luca Testoni

Max Richter, who was born in 1966 in Lower Saxony, Germany, and grew up in Bedford, England, has scheduled two concerts in July in Italy: on the 5th he will perform in the splendid setting of the Teatro Romano in Verona, while the following day he will play at the Pala De André in Ravenna, as part of the Ravenna Festival.

An award-winning classical composer, he divides his time between live performances, film, dance, art and fashion. In a career spanning more than 20 years, he has already put together nine solo albums. These include: 2015‘s “Sleep”, an eight-and-a-half-hour work based on the neuroscience of sleep, his very own “personal lullaby for a hectic world, a manifesto for a slower pace of existence”; then 2020’s ‘Voices’, inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and ‘In a Landscape’, released last autumn.

As has been pointed out by critics, the title is an intentional quotation from the album-manifesto of the same name by the American composer John Cage, one of the leading figures of the 20th century minimalist movement.

That being said, in the 75 minutes of the album, Richter, as a young pupil also of Luciano Berio, does not fail to adhere to all the stylistic features of so-called ‘modern classical’, a genre of which he is considered, and rightly so, one of its pioneers.

In the album, perhaps the most intimate and personal for him, he launches – with his usual calmness – ‘an appeal to try to reconcile polarities and differences that, never before as in these years, are everywhere around us in the world. A way in which contrasts and frenzies take centre stage’.

Info & Tickets: https://ponderosa.it/artist/max-richter/

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