Max Richter’s Voices Album Review
by Ed Power
Max Richter is that rare avant-garde composer guided by raw emotion as much as by steely intellect. He deploys his compassion and earnestness with devastating alacrity on his new album, an opus celebrating human dignity and advocating on behalf of the disadvantaged and discriminated against. But while the higher purpose behind Voices is obviously beyond reproach, the surprise is just how much joy it contains.Richter’s work has always brimmed with empathy. That has been the case whether he was writing sophisticated lullaby suites (Sleep) or applying a post-modern context to Vivaldi (Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons). Such values are again to the fore on Voices, which pays tribute to but also advocates fiercely on behalf of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In the summer of coronavirus and Black Lives Matter, the importance of us all uniting and standing up for one another is obvious. Richter, however, isn’t here to preach.
Voices instead, humbly yet with tremendous fortitude, bears witness to the Declaration of Human Rights and the part it has played in giving a voice to those who might otherwise have been left suffering in silence. It opens with a recording from 1948 of Eleanor Roosevelt quoting from the preamble to the Declaration, drafted as humanity lurched from the evils of the Second World War to the asphyxiating dread of the nuclear arms race.
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