A special 20th-anniversary reissue of composer Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks is out today via Deutsche Grammophon. The new edition of the record, first released in 2004, is available in both vinyl and streaming formats. It also features a brand new track: “On The Nature Of Daylight (Piano Version).”
Inspired by the collection of Franz Kafka writings of the same name, The Blue Notebooks was composed in 2003. Written for strings and electronics, the record builds around actress Tilda Swinton reading from Kafka’s tome, as well as from the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. Since it’s release, cuts from The Blue Notebooks have been featured in film and television projects like Waltz with Bashir, The Leftovers, Shutter Island, Arrival, The Handmaid’s Tale and
The Last of Us.
Listen to Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks now.
“It’s kind of a protest record, a response to what was happening in politics around the build-up to the Iraq war where I was really struck with doubt about what was happening,” Richter told a crowd at Glastonbury in 2023. “And I thought about Kafka, who’s the patron saint of doubt, and I thought about making a piece which expressed everything, and so we recorded this.”
In celebration of both the reissue and his most recent ninth studio album, In A Landscape, Richter is also embarking on his first-ever world tour to close out 2024 and enter 2025. Accompanied by a full string ensemble, he’ll make stops in cities across the US, UK, Europe and Australia, concluding with a May 9th, 2024 date at Los Angeles’ Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Although he’ll be supporting two records on the tour, Richter points out that In A Landscape isn’t actually that far off from the central conceits of The Blue Notebooks. “In a way this record is another look at the themes of the earlier work, but from the perspective of our world and our lives in 2024.”
