Max Richter Tickets

Revitalising classical music with forward-moving electronics in soft, post-minimalist tones, contemporary pianist and composer Max Richter built the blueprint for sparse crossover dialogues that allowed dreams and emotions to be felt and understood.

In an interview around the 20th anniversary of 2004’s The Blue Notebooks, a career-making album of piano-laden poetry and protest about the Iraq war, Max Richter described it as a “hymn to the power of creative imagination to overcome violence, both personal and political”. It’s telling of his whole musical philosophy – achingly intimate, yet confidently open to the world, the composer’s private narrative morphing into collective memory and a wealth of new interpretations. It’s a world of rich references, resonant dreams, caring but reclaiming your freedom to explore new enigmatic forms of self-expression in a reality suspended between synths, symphony and static noise.

After working for a decade with the minimalist Piano Circus – a six-strong ensemble he co-founded – and the likes of restless electronic duo The Future Sound of London, Richter embarked on a solo career with 2002’s Memoryhouse. It was an elegantly emotive attempt to reach out to new classical music audiences –what he evocatively called “documentary music” – in harrowing orchestral exchanges with the BBC Philharmonic (see the Kosovo war-inspired ‘Sarajevo’ and ‘Last Days’), redefining a sense of memory with poetry readings, ambient echoes, harpsichord melodies and flickering electronics.

It was a certified commercial failure. But the album proved a gift in disguise for Richter – an almost perverse sense of liberation from the constraints of public consumption, that gave wings to his creative muse and cemented his neoclassical vision. Its follow-up, The Blue Notebooks, was the album that got the message through, peppered as it was with Kafkaesque mystery and spoken word by enigmatic actor Tilda Swinton, the grounding sound of a typewriter, the far-flung realm of dreams and the bloody footprints of politics. The heart-wrenching ‘On the Nature Of Daylight’ has since found its way from Scorsese’s Shutter Island and Villeneuve’s Arrival to the post-apocalyptic TV landscapes of The Last Of Us, creating constant points of contact with international audiences that have now taken the composer’s overall streaming numbers to over three billion.

It was game on for Richter, whose sonic universe continued to expand. In addition to film and TV – including an award-winning score for the lauded animated docudrama Waltz With Bashir – his inviting pairings of classical and electronics have woven through numerous ballets, plays, operas and fashion events. He looped Baroque violin concertos on 2012’s Recomposed By Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons, and created an outstanding piece of 21st-century “protest music”, in his words, Sleep. Soothingly string-laced and scattered with celestial chants, this acclaimed 2015 opus was designed as an antidote to automated living, offering eight hours of ambient melodies that opened a gateway to the ultimate dream for contemporary audiences: a proper night’s rest. It's one of the most streamed classical albums of all time.

Fast forward to 2024 and the composer’s ninth In A Landscape, echoing the Notebooks from an updated perspective, explores the human condition over a convergence of acoustic melodies, electronics and field recordings in a fluent conversation with the listener’s imagination. The album is also at the heart of Richter’s first-ever world tour, turning the polarities inherent in his post-classical sounds into a spellbinding meeting of the senses and the minds, one date at a time.

For the first time since 2017, Richter announced the largest ever performances of SLEEP in London for September 2025 to mark his landmark project’s tenth anniversary.