Post-minimal, indie classical: however you term what Max Richter does, he is its master. Trained with Berio, steeped in minimalism and known for everything from creating an album of ringtones to providing atmospheric sound worlds for ballet, theatre and film, Richter spins minimalism’s endlessly repeating phrases into an orchestral-electronic mesh.
This concert paired his recent reworking of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with his career-launching early work, Memoryhouse, the composer and his laptop fronting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra on the Edinburgh Playhouse’s capacious stage.
Recomposed — Vivaldi: The Four Seasons recasts elements of the baroque masterpiece in jagged repeat rhythms and spatial theatrical sound that suggests and sometimes seems to require another dimension that the ballet, Kairos, choreographed to Recomposed and performed by Ballett Zürich from Thursday night, may provide.
Autumn is reimagined with a rhythmic tick, an effective auditory stumble that recurs in Summer, the lot played with ferocious intensity by the BBC SSO strings and the excellent Daniel Hope. The most atmospheric moments are when Vivaldi’s contorted melodies are heard as if a hazy echo from the past, but there is too much reliance on cutting off each fragment suddenly, the chords hanging in the air.
Memoryhouse again works as a series of fragments riffing around the same repeating motif. This is musical mesmerism, born of chordal repetition and inch-by-inch evolution. Richter cherrypicks literary and musical references in this overlong, repetitive but intermittently inspired journey through 20th-century Europe, here getting only its second live performance since its composition in 2002.
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With that live performance came an insightful sense of human fallibility, whether in Richter’s slight stumbling in a fast, repetitive piano section that seemed to both demand and deny mechanical perfection or the eerie subsumption of soprano Grace Davidson’s voice into the BBC SSO strings.