Max Richter's résumé becomes, nearly without exception, part and parcel to every review of his music: The German-born composer studied piano in Edinburgh and then at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He worked with electronics in Florence with Luciano Berio and co-founded Piano Circus, an ensemble devoted to work by 20th century composers such as Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt. In the mid-1990s, he collaborated with Future Sound of London, lending his piano and sampling experience to the long-running duo.
Sure, as paying dues in the field of new music goes, Richter's past is worthy of mention. But plundering his curriculum vitae also renders a certain logical lens for his work as a solo composer, a productive means of analyzing his self-described "post-Classical" compositions for strings, piano, electronics, and spoken word: When a Richter album-- especially his latest, Songs From Before-- is disassembled with his lineage in mind, its pieces are identifiable, clear precursors and allegiances made obvious. Electronic passages-- here, manipulated recordings of short-wave radio segments-- form both the underpinnings and segue sequences in Richter compositions. Their distant ambience reflects the foundations of Brian Eno's colossal ambient work (which Richter played with Piano Circus) and the corrupted warmth of Iannis Xenakis' best electronic pieces (which he studied with Ferio). Richter employees triads, so cinematic as they guide the perfect solstitial redolence of "Autumn Music 1", as freely and fondly as Pärt, and his rhythmic intricacy, so perfect as it guides the string-and-piano counterpoints of the splendid "Autumn Music 2", is an extension of Reich's pointillist thrust.
But, much as he did with 2004's beautiful The Blue Notebooks, Richter combines these disparate and proven ideas into fresh, emotive work. His central aesthetic of absolute taste-- from Robert Wyatt's staid readings of Haruki Murakami's writings to the gravitational rise of "Flowers for Yulia"-- is manifested, compositionally, through omnipresent motion. Richter's pieces are rarely still even if somewhat static, a facet epitomized by his strength with rubato, a classical technique for maintaining the essential meter of a passage by temporarily slowing or quickening the rhythm. It conjures an overwhelming emotional tizzy, bouts of rhythmic unpredictably guiding the familiar patterns of Richter's beloved minor triads. "Autumn Music 2" bridges these tendencies into a stunning manifesto where the strings and Richter's piano pull one another between poles of regret and redemption. Indeed, moments like these-- a four-minute emotional rapture, a 90-second string movement slightly damaged by radio receiver's static, a brief passage about true shades of blue-- show Richter's brilliance. By not distending his pieces in order to manifest his own dexterity, he does just that, squeezing multiple notions into slight spaces. The result is potency: Richter's music makes marionettes of otherwise reasonable people, his scoring hands the minor deities controlling strings capable of engendering instantaneous passions, regrets and decisions with simple melodic figures.
To that end, little here is ever belabored or iterative: This is quicker music for a quicker world, and it's Richter's most cohesive album to date. Of the 41 tracks he has released on the three albums billed under his own name, three of them breach seven minutes. None of these are on Songs From Before. This, very nearly, is pop music. Its self-aware brevity and dynamic could miff contemporaries in both classical and electronic music. But Richter is guided by proper artistic license: He understands that his predecessors-- from Brahms and Bach to Pärt and Glass-- made their marks in worlds apart from his own creative context, but that those composers borrowed liberally from the folk music (that is, the music at the center of their society's conscience) for the sake of source material and, quite simply, piqued audience interest. The Germans even had a word for Brahms' folk embodiments, and Beethoven lifted a Russian folk melody for a string quartet to please a Russian emissary. Richter takes techniques from the classics and modifies their approach to make more appropriate-- but no less efficacious-- statements for his own circumstances.
Given Songs From Before's thematic conceit, this is appropriate: Richter isn't interested in changing the way the world hears his music as much as idealizing how he wants to hear it. He resurrects past idols for present idioms, his heroes, proclivities and experiences donned as unrepentantly as the nostalgia at Songs' core.
