If you’re having trouble sleeping tonight ABC TV is broadcasting Max Richter’s Sleep

1

Starting at 11.30pm tonight ABC TV is broadcasting Max Richter’s 8 hour performance of Sleep from the Vivid festival in Sydney.

It is performed by Max Richter, American Contemporary Music Ensemble featuring Grace Davidson. Executive Producer Yulia Mahr.

Hailed as one of the most influential composers of his generation, Max Richter presents his record-breaking eight-hour, 31-track Sleep album in full for the first time in front an Australian audience.

From 11.30pm until 7.30am composer Max Richter, along with the same musicians who recorded the album for Deutsche Grammophon (New York’s American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME) and British soprano Grace Davidson) perform in an overnight experiment where fewer than 200 people ‘hibernate’ in an intimate, harbour-view setting exclusive to Vivid LIVE.

Conceived in consultation with famed neuroscientist David Eagleman, Richter has created ‘a personal lullaby for a frenetic world… a manifesto for a slower pace of existence’. Unfurling with glacial transitions this monumental cradle song has topped classical charts and questions cultural constructs between music and consciousness.

Coinciding as it does with the renewed interest in durational works within the fine art community, Richter says: “This isn’t something new in music, it goes back to Cage, Terry Riley, and LaMonte Young, and it’s coming around again partly as a reaction to our speeded-up lives – we are all in need of a pause button.”

Strongly influenced by Gustav Mahler’s symphonic classics, Sleep touches Richter’s heartbroken melodicism and sense of adventure; most recently heard in his celebrated re-work of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

An innovative voice in a contemporary-classical movement, the 50-year-old German-British composer only made his Australian debut in 2014 – a dozen years on from his breakthrough album Memoryhouse. Now returning with a performance that dissolves centuries of artist-audience boundaries, Max Richter invites us to watch, listen and wander into his immersive world of sound.

Share.

About Author

Bob is the features editor of Cyclic Defrost. He is also evil. You should not trust the opinions of evil people.

1 Comment

  1. Stephen Meatheringham on

    Thankfully Emirates have Sleep on their music playlist. It’s about the only thing that keeps me sane during the long haul flight between Dubai and Australia.

Leave A Reply