Norfolk & Norwich Festival 2016
Max Richter Ensemble @ Theatre Royal
20/05/16
Musicians are always telling us what to do. Jump around. Shake a tail feather. Twist and shout. Do the hokey cokey. What I’ve never been encouraged to do before, however, is to sleep. Last night’s performance by Max Richter and his ensemble, however, did just that.
Max Richter, a modern composer, has always trod his path through classical music with electronic additions with aplomb and class. We started last night, at a busy Theatre Royal, with a performance of The Blue Notebooks. This album came out in 2004, and was inspired by war and peace, featuring readings by Tilda Swinton from Kafka and Czeslaw Milosz; tracks from it were used in the films Stranger Than Fiction, Shutter Island and the amazing Waltz With Bashir.
Onstage we have Max himself at a piano and armed with an extra keyboard plus a couple of laptops, and his ensemble, a traditional string quartet but with the addition of an extra cellist. The evening starts as it means to go on, slowly and pensively, and we all settle in comfortably. The music is deceptively simple and peaceful – there’s always a slight edge of menace behind the apparent calm. Occasional samples of a tapping typewriter, birdsong, or just…noises…add a deeper side to the beautiful and tender strings. Iconography hits halfway through, with a harder traditional church organ pounding through the swirling vocals, followed by the short and heartbreaking Vladimir’s Blues. The Trees is the one that really makes it for me – a keening, wailing, razor sharp violin glides over the other strings, and I can feel it pierce my gut. It’s pure grief, pure regret, all in a couple of notes. The cellists also impress me greatly, particularly as I am myself a cellist – the sheer warmth of their sound overwhelms me, particularly their shift into vibrato and back. The Blue Notebooks finishes with Written On The Sky, a return to the theme heard earlier, and it’s a passionate, rousing finale. It’s particularly interesting to observe the intelligent choices Max has made with regard to the instrumentation – on occasion I hear a string being plucked and assume it’s being played live, but it’s actually coming from a laptop.
Post interval, where everything feels noisy and hectic, we are treated to an hour and half performance version of Max’s eight and half hour epic Sleep. This piece was originally designed to be slept to, and was performed not long ago in full in London (where there were beds instead of seats).
It’s expansive, and reassuringly steady, with long drawn out passages that seem absolutely endless. It feels like breathing in and out incredibly slowly in the safest and most peaceful place in the world, surrounded by love. I go from sitting up straight like a proper grown up to slumped down in my seat, my limbs utterly limp, drifting in and out of sleep. That perfect, soft space when you’re starting to let go of wakefulness and you’re drowsy; thoughts float mindlessly in and out and you’re sinking into the mattress like sand? That’s how I felt for an hour and half – in a meditative trance, aided by the cyclical, repetitive nature of the music, and the fact that rather like how a masseuse always leaves one hand on your body during a massage to maintain that connection, the music never really ended. A note or two bridged the gap between each piece, thereby never letting you go. There were even moments when I actually felt high, trippily, happily, out of my mind high, and sensed that there might be delta waves in the mix, or perhaps hypnotic elements, because I was totally OUT OF IT. Lifting my head up from the back of the seat literally felt impossible. Thank god there wasn’t a fire alarm because it would have taken us about five hours to get out of there, such was our lethargy.
It’s incredible that these musicians can hold their concentration and maintain such control over their bodies during this piece of music – it’s so difficult to play so quietly, so smoothly and with such repetition, I can only imagine how much their arms ached by the end. It’s a true feat of endurance and they did incredibly well. On the few occasions that I opened my eyes I saw Max at the piano, playing so quietly, so peacefully and with such gravitas, and I felt like he was watching over me as I slept. Such a wonderful feeling.
The highlight for me was Path 5 (Delta). One of the most note perfect singers I have ever heard featured on this, providing a recurrent theme that echoed through the rest of the work, looped and looped again, and at the very end of the performance, echoed until it felt like a memory from an ancient time I didn’t know I had experienced. The soaring vocals, clean and transparent as glass lifted everything and gave it an ethereal quality. It took my breath away. It's not happy music, it's not sad music, it has no real agenda...it simply just is, and it gives you permission, therefore, to also just be.
As the final notes drifted away into silence, a massive snore rang out from the audience and we all laughed and clapped and stood and whooped for what was truly a night to remember. Max Richter and his ensemble are incredible magicians, talented musicians and I hope they had a good sleep themselves last night after all their efforts.
Norfolk & Norwich Festival gives our city the opportunity to have experiences we'll never forget, that you'll tell your friends about and wish they too had been there. This was definitely one of those.
Mindblowing. Thank you for one of the best feelings I've ever felt.
Check it out..
Sleep https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNexmJaZeAs
The Blue Notebooks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNexmJaZeAs