Music Chat: Max Richter Parasitizes His Previous Wholly Parasitic Vivaldi Disc 

Actually, there are "period" synthesizers. They are called organs.

What the hey?!...on the bright side, at least it won't ooze out of your speakers!

Max Richter, a "con-poseur" (hyphenization and misspelling deliberate...)😢

The Chineke! Orchestra also covers Robert de Marley on vintage period cannabis, starring viole de ganga soloist Maria de Juana, a real smoker. As for Max Richter, come Spring 3 and I was out of there for ever. Ideal music for "Four Seasons" hotels' elevators, lobbies and reception desks, I suppose. That guy previously released an 8h30 long piece called "Sleep". He should have followed it up (or down, depending on your perspective) with a 24 year long piece titled "Coma" and ended the trip-tych with a never-ending forever-loop 1 chord piece (plucked on vintage guitar synthesizer) called "Braindead" with or without Walter Murphy's "A 5th of Beat-Oven" serving as a wake-up call...Richter is certainly the greatest composter of this century!

I actually heard the news of release of this album on my local radio station and I immediately thought David would love this. I am really curious to see how many more times they would be able to milk that poor Baroque piece before moving to the next concerto

Thank you for your good commentary! Anyway, I genuinely want to know your thoughts on arrangements of Telemann and other composers in Holland Baroque's Silk Baroque album! That will be fun! But oh well...

The end, along with Klaus Mäkelä at the Concertgebouw.

I love the way Robert Wright and George Forrest "reinvented" Borodin, Grieg and Villa-Lobos in their Broadway shows Kismet, Song of Norway, and Magdalena. But this? No.

It's good too! The 'period' synthesizer (!) takes on the role as part of the continuo group. Antonio would've loved it!

Punk rock on period instruments and synthesizers? Now there's something new...

I suggest a genuine Tinnitus-recording: Max Richter recomposes the 4th movement of Buckners 9th symphony and performs it with vintage Trautoniums and period instruments. That would become the record of the year, I'm sure.

I had to listen to it and it's awful. I remember scraping my finger nails down a blackboard and sounding like this. I do not understand the punk rock element though. Is John Lydon in the house?

I liked Vivaldi Recomposed. As for the newer, crunchier version (which I haven't heard), is it really any sillier than, say, a conductor redoing a symphony cycle for the 3rd or 4th time, claiming that it's a "new, updated" reinterpretation of the work. I don't know. However, I do know that those Richter press releases from Decca and DG are hot garbage. Unforgivable.

Oh my God, Max Richter…If you really want to listen to a breathtaking sound adventure based on the FS you should give Thomas Willbrandts Electric V. a try. That creates real fun.

There is nothing wrong with the "old" four seasons...I'll stick with Mr. Vivaldi. If I want to hear a modern "retouching" of classical music just give me Emerson, Lake, and Palmer 👍

This is in the same league as André Rieu's take on Beethoven's Ninth (Yikes).

Wouldn't a "period synthesizer" be Walter (now Wendy) Carlos's old Moog Synthesizer? Us ancient folk remember "Switched on Bach" on a Columbia L.P.

DG, the same label that hosts Benny Andersson (of Abba) and Moby ? I hope at least that Richter had access to the Walter/Wendy Carlos Moog, and that the instrument was overhauled with period components as well, otherwise it makes no sense...

I lost it when they started listing off the amount of tik tok views they have, and almost spit my water out when they compared a moog synth to a Stradivarius. Everyone involved in making this needs to be brought before the Hague and tried for crimes against humanity.

I like Vivaldi Recomposed. If you want a novel take on the Four Seasons, it's worth hearing a few times. As background music, anyway. However, I'll pass on the authentically crunchy punk rock The New Four Seasons. Edit: I listened to a track of The New Four Seasons, and it's almost identical to the same track of Vivaldi Recomposed. Arrrgh!

The Gustafsson piece is indeed elevator music.

"a favorite of ice-skaters!" LMAO!!!!

I just listened to "Spring 1" (2012) on Spotify. It sounds like a college harmony exercise. In my view it should have gotten a grade of C- at the highest. However, on Spotify there were over 65 million plays. Go figure.

I didn't know they had synthesizers in 18th century Venice.

Do you hear that sound? It's Vivaldi spinning in his grave.

Can't these record labels find someone else to prop up, other than Max Richter? There has to be talented composers graduating from various conservatories every year!

It's all grist for the post modern mill. Very funny. Thanks for the warning about Richter. I don't want those cooties.

Never heard of Max Richter, and will likely remain uninterested.

Spring 1 is notable not so much for what's added to Vivaldi as what's been removed: any sense of forward motion. (And it does the modern pop thing of burying the tune, and making it sound diffident when it appears, as though it's ashamed of itself.)

Was that a Pipo commentary at 2:43?

So far as I know Chineke Orchestra is not a period instrument group but an ethically diverse one. Have they taken up old instruments just for this,?

I'm pleased to find someone who shares my view of Richter. As someone who did a music degree 50 years ago & absorbed Boulez, Cage, Carter etc I've tried to keep up with current trends but so much now seems empty & Richter is this barren wasteland's chief flagbearer.

My only exposure to Max Richter was in the soundtrack to the movie Shutter Island, a piece called On the Nature of Daylight. A repetitious moody string ensemble passacaglia. A fantastic soundtrack of 20th century mostly classical music.

LOL! What incongruous, pretentious garbage.

PS. I finally got around to listening to a live performance of 'Vivaldi Re-composed' featuring Daniel Hope and orchestra, both on period instruments - period instruments detracted from the performance. If wiry/thin violin & string playing is your thing, you will love this performance (Hope was wiry too). I listened to excerpts of playing from a different recording on Orchid Classics featuring violinist Francisco Fallana, and it was much, much better. The non-period instrument performance had better string body hence more rhythmic power thus emphasizing the minimalist nature of the re-composition - is anybody surprised in hearing this? But the major problem with the work, regardless of instrumentation, is monotony - the lack of variety, boredom is the problem with most bad minimalism. The Fallana disc also broke up the 'Re-composed' composition with works by Isang Yun, Schnittke and Salvador Brotons - all which quote older styles of music. I think Orchid Classics realized that 'Re-composed' is a boring composition, regardless of performance, and the decision to augment it with Yun, Schnittke and Brotons is to relieve the tedium.

I just listened to a few brief samples of this dreck on a download site. Bloody terrible.

Thank goodness I saw this video! This type of music is a disgrace to Decca's and DG's history and all treasures in their catalog. When I saw some people around me listening to these lame "recomposed things", I thought maybe there was something I did not understand! I hope the labels use some of the money they make on this stuff to promote truly good music!

I do like Max Richter's SLEEP... in that it is very good at making me drowsy (which is what it's supposed to do, right?). And I actually didn't mind his original Vivaldi Recomposed, which I thought was a semi-interesting thought exercise. Lightweight but not unpleasant to listen to in the background (mostly because he's cribbing from one of the best). But yeah, for him to remake it *again* sounds like a composer who is running really low on ideas. Then again, if the streaming stats are to be believed, he may just be giving the audience what they want. Cynical cash grab? Sure. But the music industry is full of those. I mean, once Mannheim Steamroller found out how much the public loves Christmas carols played on synthesizers, they pretty much stopped making anything else. (Does Chip Davis just love Christmas that much? I don't think even Jesus loves Christmas that much!) And apparently, there's a real appetite in the public for VIvaldi peanut butter. Who knew?!

The Fenella Humphreys recording of Recomposed by Max Richter is a tremendously inspired re-imagining of an extremely familiar masterpiece played with incredible sensitivity and feeling. Definitely some of the most hauntingly beautiful music to come from a living composer. Who knows what the genre is - why not a genre of 'recomposition'? Anyway I find it innovative and wonderful as do my many friends to whom I've played it. Looking forward to hearing more from the brilliant Max Richter!

I’ll stick to Waldo de los Rios, thank you.

Listening to Richters' own music (second rate Philip Glass /Michael Nyman at best, at worst uninspired Klaus Schultze kind of stuff) one would indeed need a shot of Vivaldi every half an hour or so to stay lively.. Well, at least he delivers the cure with the poison, even if not adding anything significant to it as he claims.

I see It has been liked by everyone except classical music lovers!!! 😜 Specially by peanut butter crunchies.

While I do agree that this "New" 'Four seasons recomposed' is a bit crazy, as are those ridiculous press releases, I'm going to be honest here: I have and always have had a soft spot for his original 'recomposition' of Vivaldi's four seasons. I think it has done a lot, and not just for me, for making this music enjoyable again.

Can't be period performance.....no Theremin.

Back in the late 80's/early 90's a Mozart album was released featuring Neville Marriner conducting, I think, St. Martin in the Fields, with a synthesized beat added to the music. The first overture featured was The Marriage of Figaro. I played it for my roommate and he immediately said....shut it off, shut it off, shut it off.....and it was shut off. So this is in a long line of 'progressive' interpretations which trash the classics. There have been some interesting re-interpretations of The Four Seasons including those done by Red Priest, Gilles Apap & The Colors of Invention and a Chinese interpretation performed on Chinese instruments. As for this disc, I dare say it was a decomposition of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons.

Sorry, David, but you have forgotten to tell us if the synthesizer is a reconstructed 18th century copy or a real one of that age.

I actually love this piece but this recording and this marketing are not good. This piece didn't need to be recorded more than once.

It's crap. I haven't even heard it and it's crap. How do I know it's crap? Because I've heard his first "recomposition" of the piece and know that the only way he could improve on it would be to remove all the Richter parts.

Compared to today’s culture as discussed here, renaming Mozart’s 21 Piano Concerto the “Elvira Madigan” in the late 1960’s doesn’t seem so awful

Actually I like punk rock, but I'm not interested in that release at all.