It’s time Britain embraced classical heritage, says Taboo composer
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Version 0 of 1. The renowned composer Max Richter, whose work includes major film and ballet scores, as well as TV themes such as BBC1’s hit drama Taboo, has urged Britain to take greater pride in its classical music heritage, from Henry Purcell to Harrison Birtwistle. “In Germany, people feel like they own classical music, that it is somehow theirs,” Richter said. “Over there everyone still learns to play, and the great composers don’t seem alien.” Richter, 50, made headlines in 2015 when his eight-hour concert, Sleep, was staged in London. He was born in Germany and is highly regarded there as well as in Hollywood, but he is in fact British, with a homegrown musical education that he still values. “It’s true that many of the best-known composers were German or Austrian, but we should remember how good the music tradition is in Britain too, because it has an informality and a fluidity that should really be celebrated,” said Richter, as his ballet Woolf Works returned to the Royal Opera House, and ahead of the release next week of his new Deutsche Grammophon album of themes from the Covent Garden production. Richter’s call for a boost to UK musical confidence underlines comments made by Sir Simon Rattle, one of the world’s elite conductors. Rattle is to return to his native Britain from Germany in September, after 15 years with the Berlin Philharmonic, to take over as musical director of the London Symphony Orchestra. Last Tuesday he announced that he would mark his arrival with a fresh commitment to British composers. “Here we are in this country, with maybe the most gifted group of living composers of any country in the world, and not to celebrate it would be idiocy,” said Rattle. “It’s a goldmine to explore, so of course this will be what we do.” Each LSO season will open with a new work commissioned by Rattle from a British composer. The first will be by 36-year-old Helen Grime, while others to be featured include Birtwistle, Thomas Adès and Oliver Knussen. Although Richter’s name is most familiar to fans of contemporary music, his compositions have influenced other art forms for more than a decade. This weekend the ballet he created with Royal Ballet choreographer Wayne McGregor, based on three novels by Virginia Woolf, is back at Covent Garden and will be broadcast to cinema audiences on 8 February. On the Nature of Daylight, a track from Richter’s second album, is on the soundtrack of Arrival, the sci-fi film tipped for Oscar contention, and he composed the TV score for Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, as well as the theme and incidental music for BBC costume drama Taboo. Richter also scored the acclaimed and disturbing HBO drama The Leftovers, starring Justin Theroux. The composer’s Max Richter Ensemble is to play at the Nocturne festival at Blenheim Palace in June. It will perform works including Vivaldi Recomposed, his reimagining of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and will premiere music from his new album, Three Worlds: Music From Woolf. The Vivaldi project earned Richter most acclaim in Germany, because, he thinks, “it is a bit more classical”, yet he is often called “post-classical”, a category he regards as rather tongue-in-cheek. “I have always been persona non grata in classical circles,” said Richter, “but it’s a badge of honour. Unless people are tutting you, you’re not doing your job.” He added that he dislikes the idea of a musical hierarchy, though his music is inspired by a “highbrow aesthetic”. Growing up in Bedford with parents who were not musical, Richter benefited from an enlightened school music teacher and from a local milkman, who was an unlikely fan of the avant-garde music scene in New York. “He heard me practising piano when I was about 12 and encouraged me, dropping off new vinyl recordings of contemporary composers along with the milk bottles.” Richter believes early exposure to all genres of music is essential. “All music is just a collision of sounds until you know its internal conventions and understand the nuances. It’s a question of familiarity.” He says British listeners’ tastes are more avant garde than they realise, and points out that in a film or ballet many will happily sit through a bold contemporary score of the kind that might quickly empty a concert hall. “You can get away with a lot more in a film or television score,” he said. “It is contextual.” Richter’s enthusiasm for collaborating with film-makers and choreographers comes from a creative excitement, he said, and not from the urge to reach a wider audience. “I enjoy storytelling. With Taboo, I wanted to do it when they came to me with some of the script and a mood-board to look at because I love the world.” The piece used by Arrival director Denis Villeneuve was taken from the 2004 anti-Iraq war album The Blue Notebooks. It was also used by Martin Scorsese in the soundtrack for Shutter Island in 2010. Richter has recently worked on the music for British director John Madden’s Washington gun lobby thriller, Miss Sloane. The composer believes Britain’s musical heritage is now under attack as funding for teaching is eroded. The burden is being shouldered, he said, by a few enthusiasts making a difference to young people in lucky pockets of the country. Given a magic baton to wave, rather like Rattle’s, Richter said he would use his powers to make sure more children hear live music regularly. “And not in an intimidating setting,” he said. “Classical music is a contagious thing, but you have to be exposed.” |