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Combining classical discipline with the inventive spirit of electronic music, Max Richter speaks to -- and frequently critiques -- 21st century life with evocative elegance. On early masterworks such as 2002's Memoryhouse and 2003's The Blue Notebooks, the composer and producer united his childhood memories and commentary on war's devastating aftermath into gorgeous, aching music; with 2015's eight-hour Sleep, he challenged the increasing disposability of art and music as well as audiences' ever-decreasing attention spans. Richter's fascination with the growing role of technology in everyday life was a major theme of releases spanning 2008's collection of bespoke ringtones to the music for a particularly paranoid 2016 episode of the TV series Black Mirror. Despite the high-concept nature of much of his work, Richter always maintains a powerful emotional connection with his listeners. 2012's Recomposed: The Four Seasons, an experimental reimagining of Vivaldi's violin concertos, topped classical charts in over 20 countries. The emotive quality of his music translated perfectly to scoring and soundtrack work, which ranged from documentaries such as Waltz with Bashir (2008); feature films including Ad Astra (2019); television series like Invasion (2021); and stage productions including Infra (2008) and Woolf Works (2015), both projects with Richter's longtime collaborator, choreographer Wayne McGregor. Richter's mix of modern composition, electronic music, and field recordings -- which he revisited on 2024's In a Landscape -- was as influential as it was innovative, paving the way for artists such as Nico Muhly and Jóhann Jóhannsson.

Born in West Germany in the mid-'60s, Richter and his family moved to the U.K. when he was still a little boy, settling in the country town of Bedford. By his early teens, he was listening to the canon of classical music as well as modern composers including Philip Glass, whose music was a major influence on Richter. The Clash, the Beatles, and Pink Floyd were also important, along with the early electronic music scene; inspired by artists such as Kraftwerk, Richter built his own analog instruments. He studied composition and piano at Edinburgh University, the Royal Academy of Music, and in Florence with Luciano Berio.

He then became a founding member of the Piano Circus, a contemporary classical group that played works by Glass, Brian Eno, Steve Reich, Arvo Pärt, and Julia Wolfe, and also incorporated found sounds and video into their performances. After ten years and five albums for Decca/Argo, Richter left the group and became more involved in the U.K.'s thriving electronic music scene, collaborating with the Future Sound of London on 1996's Dead Cities (which features a track named after him) and The Isness; he also contributed orchestrations to Roni Size's 2000 album In the Mode.

Richter's own work evolved from the Xenakis-inspired music of his early days into something that included his electronic and pop influences. His 2002 debut album, Memoryhouse, introduced his mix of modern composition, electronica, and field recordings. Recorded with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, the album explored childhood memories as well as the aftermath of the Kosovo War in the 1990s and was hailed as a masterpiece. Two years later, Richter made his FatCat debut with The Blue Notebooks, which incorporated readings from Franz Kafka's Blue Octavo Notebooks and Polish writer Czesław Miłosz by actress Tilda Swinton into dreamlike pieces for strings and piano that touched on the Iraq War and Richter's early years. Released in 2006, Songs from Before paired his plaintive sound with texts written by Haruki Murakami and delivered by Robert Wyatt.

In 2008, he issued 24 Postcards in Full Colour, a collection of intricate ringtones envisioned by Richter as a way to connect people around the world. That year also saw the release of his music for Ari Folman's Golden Globe-winning film Waltz with Bashir. Focusing on electronics instead of a typical orchestral score, it was Richter's highest-profile soundtrack project to date. He then worked on several other film scores, including music for Benedek Fliegauf's Womb, Alex Gibney's My Trip to Al-Qaeda, and David MacKenzie's Perfect Sense. Another scoring project, Infra, marked the beginning of Richter's enduring collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor. Commissioned by the Royal Ballet in 2008, Infra was a ballet inspired by T.S. Eliot's classic poem "The Wasteland," and the 2005 London terrorist bombings. Richter re-recorded and expanded his music for the 2010 album Infra, his fourth release for FatCat Records.

Richter began the 2010s with soundtrack work that included the award-winning scores to Die Fremde (2010) and Lore (2012). The composer reunited with McGregor for 2012's Sum, a chamber opera based on Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives, a collection of short stories by neuroscientist David Eagleman about the possibility of life after death. That year also saw the release of one of Richter's most popular albums, Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi - The Four Seasons. An avant-garde, loop-based reworking of the composer's timeless set of violin concertos, it topped the classical charts in 22 countries, including the U.K., the U.S., and Germany. In turn, McGregor choreographed a ballet, Kairos, to Richter's recomposition. Disconnect, the score to Henry-Alex Rubin's film about the impact of technology on relationships, arrived in 2013. His other releases that year included the score to Wadjda, which was the first feature-length film made by a Saudi Arabian woman (director Haifaa Al-Mansour); the music to Ritesh Batra's The Lunchbox; and Ruairí Robinson's sci-fi excursion The Last Days on Mars. Richter also worked with Folman again on the music to The Congress, an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's novel The Futurological Congress.

In 2014, Richter launched a mentorship program for aspiring young composers and wrote music for HBO's The Leftovers, which also featured pieces from Memoryhouse and The Blue Notebooks. The following year saw the arrival of Sleep, an eight-hour ambient piece scored for piano, strings, electronics, and vocals that Richter described as a "lullaby for a frenetic world and a manifesto for a slower pace of existence." The piece premiered at a Berlin performance where the audience was given beds instead of seats. Sleep and From Sleep, a one-hour adaptation, were released in September 2015. The following year, Richter provided the score to the sci-fi/horror film Morgan and the disturbingly cheery music for "Nosedive," an episode of Black Mirror that took the all-consuming nature of social media to extremes. Released in January 2017, Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works drew from his score for McGregor's 2015 Royal Ballet production inspired by three of Virginia Woolf's most acclaimed novels. It was followed that May by the soundtrack compilation Out of the Dark Room. That September, Richter's Emmy-nominated music for the BBC One drama Taboo was released.

Richter remained busy on soundtrack work in 2018, with projects including the music for the HBO TV series My Brilliant Friend as well as the scores to films like Hostiles, White Boy Rick, and Mary Queen of Scots, which won a Best Original Score -- Feature Film Award at the Hollywood Music in Media Awards. For his score to the August 2019 film Ad Astra, he used plasma wave data from NASA's Voyager Interstellar Mission played by a custom virtual instrument as an element of his compositions (two years later, the score earned Richter his first Grammy nomination). That October, Deutsche Grammophon issued Voyager: Essential Max Richter, an expansive retrospective that included two previously unreleased pieces written for Sleep.

Richter continued to expand on Sleep in 2020, first with the documentary Max Richter's Sleep, which premiered in North America at that year's Sundance Film Festival, and later with an app designed to help listeners use the work for focus, meditation, and rest. His other projects that year included contributions to Rudolf Buchbinder's Diabelli Variations project, music for the second season of My Brilliant Friend, and Journey CP1919, a work commissioned for the Aurora Orchestra and inspired by the discovery of the first pulsar star. July 2020 saw the release of Voices, a work combining crowd-sourced readings of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a "negative orchestra" comprising eight violins, six violas, 24 cellos, 12 double basses, and a harp. A decade in the making, Voices included performances by violinist Mari Samuelsen, the choir Tenebrae, and solo soprano Grace Davidson. A second volume, Voices 2, followed in 2021. Richter additionally collaborated with Kristjan Järvi and the Baltic Sea Philharmonic on an album titled Exiles, which included orchestral versions of some of his earlier works. He also released his score for the first season of the television series Invasion. Richter collaborated with Kristjan Järvi and the Baltic Sea Philharmonic on August 2021's Exiles, a ballet piece about the refugee crisis that included orchestral versions of some of his earlier works. In 2022, the composer worked with McGregor once more, scoring an adaptation of Margaret Atwood's MaddAdam trilogy commissioned by the National Ballet of Canada and the Royal Ballet. That year, Richter also returned to The Four Seasons with The New Four Seasons - Vivaldi Recomposed. Featuring violinist Elena Urioste and the Chineke! Orchestra, this version employed vintage analog synthesizers and period-accurate instruments for a rawer approach to Vivaldi's work. March 2023 saw the release of SLEEP: Tranquility Base, an EP of electronic interpretations of the original piece accompanied by remixes courtesy of Kelly Lee Owens and Alva Noto.

Richter's music for a major Mark Rothko exhibition, the Johan Renck film Spaceman, and the spy thriller TV series The Veil preceded his ninth solo album, September 2024's In a Landscape. Recorded at Studio Richter Mahr, the creative space he built with his wife, award-winning visual artist Yulia Mahr, the album's balance of electronic and acoustic instrumentation, everyday moments, and life's big ideas echoed Memoryhouse and The Blue Notebooks. Richter supported In a Landscape with a tour that included dates with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble. ~ Heather Phares

Violinist Elena Urioste is well known as a soloist and as a chamber music collaborator with various players, including her husband, pianist Tom Poster. She is a co-founder of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective.

Urioste was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in April of 1986 but grew up in the Philadelphia suburb of Lansdale. Her parents enjoyed classical music but were not musicians themselves. When Urioste was two, she viewed violinist Itzhak Perlman's appearance on the children's television show Sesame Street and asked her parents for a violin. After several years, they gave in, and she was able to take violin lessons at her public school and then from private teachers. Urioste performed at 13 with the Philadelphia Orchestra and graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music, studying with Joseph Silverstein, Pamela Frank, and Ida Kavafian. She went on to the Juilliard School, studying with Joel Smirnoff. Urioste took top prizes in the junior and senior Sphinx Competition for young players of minority backgrounds, and that led to a debut at Carnegie Hall in New York in 2004 and to the release of an album on the White Pine label in 2008. She also performed at New York's Lincoln Center in 2009, and she earned a Salon de Virtuosi career grant. Another milestone in Urioste's career development was her designation as a BBC New Generation Artist from 2012 to 2014.

Urioste has divided her time between the U.S. and Britain, and she has appeared with many top orchestras in both places, including the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, and London Philharmonic, as well as the Boston Pops and the Malaysian Philharmonic. Her recital career has taken her to London's Wigmore Hall, Kennedy Center, and the Konzerthaus in Berlin, among other leading venues. Urioste is an enthusiastic chamber musician who has collaborated with such luminaries as Mitsuko Uchida, Kim Kashkashian, and members of the Guarneri Quartet. She founded the Chamber Music by the Sea Festival and remains its artistic director. In 2009, Urioste took up yoga, and she established a program called Intermission that combines practice in music, yoga, and meditation. She made several albums for the BIS label in the mid-2010s. In 2020, Urioste moved to the Orchid Classics label, recording To the Spring, an album of Grieg's violin sonatas. That year, Urioste and Poster experienced a COVID-related lockdown in Philadelphia, making use of the time by posting 88 online videos in a #UriPosteJukebox online series, performing music requested by listeners (anything for violin and piano or that they could arrange for the combination). The project was highly successful, winning the Royal Philharmonic Society's Inspiration Award and spawning a recording, The Jukebox Album, released on Orchid Classics in 2021. ~ James Manheim

The Chineke! Orchestra has a motto, "Championing change and celebrating diversity in classical music," and the stated goal of its sponsoring Chineke! Foundation is "to provide career opportunities to young Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) classical musicians in the U.K. and Europe." In its inaugural performance, the orchestra's 62 musicians represented 31 different nationalities.

The Chineke! Orchestra and Foundation were launched in 2015, both the brainchild of double bassist Chi-Chi Nwanoku. The name is Igbo for "God creates." Nwanoku was a founding member of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, has taught at the Royal College of Music, and has been well known in the U.K. as a broadcaster, putting together programs like one for the BBC Radio 4 network on the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. She was aware of the work of the U.S.-based Sphinx Foundation, which has worked to train and to increase opportunities for young musicians of color. Her moment of revelation came when she attended a concert by the Kinshasa Symphony Orchestra at London's Southbank Centre. "One thing I noticed at that concert," Nwanoku told the London Independent, "was the incredulity on the faces of the philanthropists and politicians in the audience, looking at a stage filled primarily with Black people."

The Chineke! Foundation sponsors not only the Chineke! Orchestra but also the Chineke! Ensemble, a chamber ensemble made up of the orchestra's principal musicians, and the Chineke! Junior Orchestra, which is aimed at providing training and encouragement to talented young musicians. Yet the performing organizations have proven to have more than an educational or career-development function. The Orchestra has attracted support from the likes of the BBC, the Association of British Orchestras, the Royal Philharmonic Society, and Arts Council England from the beginning. It gave its debut concert in September of 2015 at Queen Elizabeth Hall and was appointed an Associate Orchestra at London's Southbank Centre in the spring of the following year, returning to perform there at the Royal Festival Hall.

The year 2017 saw several festival dates, the orchestra's first international appearance (in Ghent, Belgium), and performances at the Royal Albert Hall in its first BBC Proms concert. That year, the Chineke! Orchestra was signed to the Signum label and released its debut album, featuring music by Sibelius (Finlandia, Op. 26, which had been the Biafran national anthem) and Dvořák. Many of its concerts have featured music by composers of African descent, including several world premieres by Hannah Kendall and Roderick Williams, among others. In 2020, the Chineke! Orchestra released The Spark Catchers on the NMC label. ~ James Manheim