Max Richter - In a Landscape

A Closer Listen

Max Richter would not mind at all if you curled up with a good book while listening to his music.  His new album is intended to be a bookend to The Blue Notebooks, one of the artist’s earliest and best loved recordings.  Well-loved, waterlogged paperbacks are displayed on the cover of In a Landscape and reading features prominently in the album’s first video.  Keats, Wordsworth and Anne Carson are listed as influences, while lines from literary works have been translated into track titles.  One of the main themes – the “quiet pleasures of living” – is illuminated by nine brief “Life Studies” interspersed between the compositions: field recordings that seem humble on the surface, yet speak volumes: wooded footsteps, sizzling eggs, a trolley in motion, whistling and light conversation.

As Richter writes, the album is also concerned with “reconciling polarities,” which in 2024 may be the planet’s most relevant theme.  The fusing of elements into a harmonious whole: electronic and acoustic, studio and field recording, serves as a metaphor for the message.  But before these parts are synthesized, Richter takes time to delve into the emotions that result from disruption.  No living composer captures sorrow as well as Richter, and he’s been doing it for decades.  Two recordings in particular – “And Some Will Fall” and “Late and Soon” – crack the heart and leave it wide open.

“And Some Will Fall” arrives relatively early in the album, establishing an early bed of strings whose power accumulates with their density and volume.  When the main six-note motif retreats, allowing counter-melodies to rise to the fore, one hears the piece as a dialogue: voices yearning to be heard, yet more importantly, seeking consonance.  The album’s power comes from the fact that the tension is not fully resolved within any one piece; the wrestling continues across all nineteen tracks.  Only five short pieces and eight minutes lie between “And Some Will Fall” and “Late and Soon,” which comes across as even more mournful.  Something in our human dialogue has been lost; will it ever be restored?  Wordsworth’s poem begins:

The world is too much with us, late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;- Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

One can hear the poem’s echoes in the music.  “For this, for everything, we are out of tune,” writes Wordsworth; “It moves us not.”  And yet Wordsworth was moved, and Richter in turn, and perhaps the listener as well.  By setting aside space for field recordings, the composer highlights “The Poetry of Earth (Geophony),” allowing it equal space, a gesture of profound respect.

The album has its own bookends as well.  “They Will Shade Us With Their Wings” and first single “Movement, Before All Flowers” represent Richter’s natural optimism.  Would it be a stretch to say that some of this optimism stems from reading?  The first guides the listener gently into the album, albeit on a wave of low notes, seeking their mirror image.  But by the midway point, the orchestra is already exuding comfort.  It is safe to enter these shores.  The finale is comforting from the start, evidence of distance traveled.  In the video, Phoebe is reading, but she is also listening, pondering, returning to the text.  The frame of the door looks like the pages of a book, as if the book is in the reader’s hands, but the reader is in the pages of a greater book.  She picks up a pen and begins to write.  We write the story that becomes the world.  (Richard Allen)

Available here