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NovemberMax Richter

Max Richter - November (from Memoryhouse)

Max Richter is a German-born British composer. Memoryhouse, his first solo album, is a journey though the 20th century which unfolds like the soundtrack to an imaginary film. Combining the BBC Philharmonic under conductor Rumon Gamba—no strangers to recording classic film scores—with atmospheric electronics, the result is a melancholy evocation of love, loss and survival, often with the focus on Eastern Europe. Minimalism with a deeply emotional core, overlaid with fragments of poetic voices, the melodic sensibility lies between Philip Glass’s minimalism, Wojciech Kilar’s The Portrait of a Lady and the film scores of Zbigniew Preisner. Both the piano writing and the intense lament “Sarajevo” echo Preisner’s work on Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours Trilogy. Other, more electronic pieces such as “Untitled (Figures)” parallel Richter’s work with the Future Sound of London and his collaborations with Roni Size. Richter, who was co-founder of Piano Circus, has delivered the sort of intelligent, imaginative, accessible new music one might expect to find on Radio Three’s Late Junction, so much so that this is one of the first releases on the Late Junction label. In the composer’s words, Memoryhouse tells “a story about where we have been, and asks the question: ‘Where we are going?’” The answer is couched in thoroughly modern insecurity, at the heart of a passionately conceived, impeccably performed odyssey of spectral beauty.

Source: amazon.co.uk