
"I think it's been received in the spirit that I wrote it, which is, in a way, an act of love towards this fantastic masterpiece," Richter says. Richter says he hasn't heard these sentiments expressed as much as he'd feared, and that it's been received quite well. They argue that it's at worst a dumbing down of the music - and at best doesn't trust the music to stand on its own. There's a strain of classical music fan who gets frustrated with these kinds of recompositions or remixes. I thought, 'Well, why don't I just treat this like a loop, like something you might hear in dance music, and just loop it and intensify it, and cut and paste - jump-cut around in that texture, but keep that groove going."
"I took the opening motif, which I always thought was a dazzling moment in the Vivaldi, but in the original it's only four bars.
from Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Richter's "recompositions" are both subtle and forward, and, in some cases, start a groove. The opening bars have been recorded, re-recorded and Muzak-ed to death. For me, the record and the project are trying to reclaim the piece, to fall in love with it again." We hear it everywhere - when you're on hold, you hear it in the shopping center, in advertising it's everywhere. Then, later on, as I became more musically aware - literate, studied music and listened to a lot of music - I found it more difficult to love it. "It's beautiful, charming music with a great melody and wonderful colors. "As a child, I fell in love with it," he tells NPR's Audie Cornish. But as he grew older, that passion faded. Richter says that as a child, he loved The Four Seasons. He has a new album simply titled Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi, The Four Seasons. Composer Max Richter's new album takes on Vivaldi's Fo ur Seasons.Ĭomposer Max Richter has done a brave thing for any artist in any medium: He's messed with a classic, specifically, Vivaldi's four violin concertos known as The Four Seasons.