Max Richter

Composer Max Richter has built an impressive career at the forefront of post-classical music, blending classical composition with electronic textures, ambient soundscapes and minimalism. Born in Germany in 1966 and raised in England, Richter studied composition at Edinburgh University and London’s Royal Academy of Music, and with Luciano Berio in Florence. He co-founded the contemporary-classical keyboard sextet Piano Circus in 1989 and released his debut album Memoryhouse in 2002 which took the Kosovo conflict as its theme. It introduced his gift for writing accessible, melodic forms of protest music with serious intellectual underpinnings. In 2004, The Blue Notebooks garnered acclaim for its electronics-augmented documentary approach and became popular through its use on TV and movie soundtracks. Richter explored musical miniatures on Songs from Before (2006) and 24 Postcards in Full Colour (2008), then went large-scale with 2015’s eight-and-a-half-hour-long Sleep, an album that drew on scientific research into the relationship between music and slumber. Recomposed By Max Richter: Vivaldi, The Four Seasons, in which Richter overlays Vivaldi’s concertos with a spacious, dreamlike minimalism, was released in 2012 with a follow-up in 2022: The New Four Seasons – Vivaldi Recomposed. Other notable albums include 2021’s Exiles, a moving tribute to people across the world fleeing war, and written in response to the humanitarian crisis arising from the Syrian civil war. And in 2025, Richter’s soundtrack to the Shakespeare-themed movie Hamnet garnered a Golden Globe as well as BAFTA and Academy Award nominations. In 2025 Richter hosted a radio show on Apple Music Chill, Songs of a Jumping Universe, in which he explored unexpected connections in music.