widthIn 2015, when Max Richter sat down to create a new ballet score, he knew what he wanted to say. In April of the same year, an overcrowded ship sank off the coast of Libya. On its way to Italy, Killed at least 800 trapped immigrants – Including children between 10 and 12 years old. In his (at the time) hometown of Berlin, this crisis cannot be ignored.German Chancellor Angela Merkel Words spoken We did it (We can finish this), But as the number of refugees applying for asylum increases, The same goes for the attacks on their homes.
Richter’s reaction was instinctive: a 33-minute work called “The Exile”, created at the Dutch Dance Theatre for Singulière Odyssée by Sol Leon and Paul Lightfoot, inspired by Richter’s work Said “the big problem at the time”. Five years after its premiere in 2016, this reflection work now forms the core and soul of Richter’s new album, Exile, which was recorded in Tallinn, Estonia in 2019 and will be released on August 6. This is a retrospective, composed of newly arranged tracks from his past catalog. However, Richter told me via a video call from his home in Oxfordshire that despite our rapid news cycle, it is still relevant: “This crisis is still with us in different forms.”
Exile, travel and borders are the themes that Richter keeps in mind when choosing an orchestra to play his music. This is a loose gathering of musicians from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Russia and Sweden. .Richter thinks Baltic Philharmonic Orchestra It has the function of “making peace”: “Music is a shared space where people with different experiences, perspectives and social backgrounds can get together and create something.” The isolationist stance after Brexit will only make Richter Even more bold. “I am European,” he said. “Such transnational issues require cooperation, basic cooperation, and rethinking borders and what they even mean in 2021.”
When the conductor Christian Jarvi Describe the orchestra he founded in 2008, which he called “young” and “naive”; a vagrant group seeking to “eliminate the border between East and West.” Järvi grinned in the sunshine in the gardens outside Tallinn, recalling his childhood in Estonia in the 1970s, looking at Finland, this is a frustratingly unreachable lighthouse of freedom on the other side of the bay. “Those boundaries no longer exist,” he told me. On the contrary, the Baltic Sea is now “the glue that unites all these EU and non-EU countries, Slavic and non-Slavic, as a cultural unit. The country is reborn as an orchestra.”
Järvi told me that there are different types of exiles in each era. Just a few weeks ago, Estonians commemorated the 80th anniversary of the so-called June expulsion, when thousands of people were forcibly expelled from their homes by the Soviet Union. “The whole idea of the exile is a story about human nature, because you can even distill it into tribalism,” he said. “I own this land, and you own that land.” The mission statement of the Baltic Philharmonic Orchestra is to transcend these boundaries and break the rules, not only concerning the meaning of contemporary society in 2021, but also how traditional orchestras should be mobilized and created .
In 2017, they played Stravinsky’s “Fire Bird” entirely from memory, a technique often used by the Baltic Philharmonic Orchestra. Musicians often stand instead of sitting, and they are often separated from their parts. “Why does Mozart want to be Haydn Either Beethoven picture Schumann? “Jalvi asked. “Every orchestra is a microcosm of society, and this society is a completely hierarchical model of authority. For Richter, this ideology made them the perfect orchestra for his work: what he called “radical music.”
I asked him if he could explain what he meant? “I think the essence of creativity is radicalism,” he said. “It’s about meaning, about experiment, about unknown, about discovery.” Every track on Exiles has been carefully selected. Richter reviewed his musical history, re-arranged “The Essence of Daylight”, his response to the outbreak of the Iraq War, and reimagined “Haunted Ocean 1”, from screenwriter and director Ali Forman on the Lebanese War In the soundtrack of the animated documentary, Waltz with Bashir, In 2008.
Richter told me that every music record is a journey of discovery. “Those people in the room that day, this is what makes it special. This is a laboratory.” Järvi calls it sub-quantum music. The Estonian conductor may be an F-sharp person, and the Richter may be a G-flat, but they are still sitting on the same note. When he heard Richter’s orchestral ideas, he felt that they were as if they were written by himself. He said that a harmonious transformation exists in all of us.
However, despite all the searches, the Exile ended with a “hypothetical” moment that was far from resolved. “Is there a better way for us to lead?” Richter asked me. “Can we transform things into something more humane, more sustainable and more equal? This is a big question.”
