Richter's solo albums include:
Memoryhouse (2002) During a trip to
Lantau island in 1994, Richter saw a gate to an old
Zen monastery bearing the inscription "Time does not exist. What is memory?", sparking his interest in memory. Richter's solo debut,
Memoryhouse, an experimental album of "documentary music" recorded with the
BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, explores real and imaginary stories and histories. Several of the tracks, such as "Sarajevo", "November", "Arbenita", and "Last Days", deal with the aftermath of the
Kosovo conflict, while others are of childhood memories (e.g. "Laika's Journey"). The music combines ambient sounds, voices (including that of
John Cage), and poetry readings from the work of
Marina Tsvetaeva.
BBC Music called the album "a masterpiece in neoclassical composition".
Memoryhouse was first played live by Richter at the
Barbican Centre on 24 January 2014 to coincide with a vinyl re-release of the album.
Pitchfork gave the re-release an 8.7 rating, commenting on its extensive influence:In 2002, Richter's ability to weave subtle electronics against the grand BBC Philharmonic Orchestra helped suggest new possibilities and locate fresh audiences that composers such as
Nico Muhly and
Michał Jacaszek have since pursued. As you listen to new work by
Julianna Barwick or
Jóhann Jóhannsson, thank Richter; just as
Sigur Rós did with its widescreen rock, Richter showed that crossover wasn't necessarily an artistic curse.
The Blue Notebooks (2004) Named by
The Guardian in 2019 as one of the best classical works of the century,
The Blue Notebooks, released in 2004, featured the actress
Tilda Swinton reading from
Kafka's
The Blue Octavo Notebooks and the work of
Czesław Miłosz. Upon release,
Pitchfork described the album as "Not only one of the finest record of the last six months, but one of the most affecting and universal contemporary classical records in recent memory." Richter has said that
The Blue Notebooks is a protest album about the
Iraq War, as well as a meditation on his own troubled childhood. This album is "more interior in nature" to the previous
Memoryhouse, but certain themes are present in both, with the main theme of
Memoryhouse played by a cello in "Europe after the Rain", present in "
On the Nature of Daylight", this time played by a violin. The second track, "On the Nature of Daylight", is used in both the opening and closing sequences of the sci-fi film
Arrival and on the soundtracks of
Martin Scorsese's
Shutter Island and
Chloé Zhao’s
Hamnet. It is also used in episode 3, "
Long, Long Time", of the HBO series
The Last of Us. To mark the 10th anniversary of its release, Richter created a track-by-track commentary for
Drowned in Sound, in which he described the album as a series of interconnected dreams and an exploration of the chasm between lived experience and imagination. On the eve of its 2018 reissue, marking the 15th anniversary of its release,
Fact named the album "one of the most iconic pieces of classical and protest music of the 21st century." The re-release included a new cover design and several new tracks that were originally composed for the project. Richter also released another single, "Cypher", an 8-minute classical-electronic track based upon the theme of "On the Nature of Daylight".
Songs from Before (2006) In 2006, Richter released his third solo album,
Songs from Before, which features
Robert Wyatt reading texts by
Haruki Murakami inbetween strings, electronic sounds and "dream struck piano". It expanded on the minimalist soundscapes of his earlier work. Writing in The Guardian, critic John L Waters awarded it four stars, and described it as "rewarding repeated listening" with its strong melodies complementing its atmospherics.
Pitchfork described is as "his most cohesive album to date", commenting on his use of
rubato conjuring "an overwhelming emotional tizzy, bouts of rhythmic unpredictably guiding the familiar patterns of Richter's beloved minor triads".
24 Postcards in Full Colour (2008) Richter released his fourth solo album
24 Postcards in Full Colour, a collection of 24 classically composed miniatures for
ringtones, in 2008. The pieces are a series of variations on the basic material, scored for strings, piano, and electronics. Discussing the album with NPR Classical in 2017, Richter said: "People were downloading ringtones at the time and I felt this was a missed opportunity for composers—that there was a space opening up, maybe a billion little loudspeakers walking around the planet, but nobody was really thinking of this as a space for creative music. So I set out to make these tiny little fragments and then, of course, in the poetic sense, the idea of these little sounds carrying objects traversing the planet—I started to think of these as a connection, as a sort of postcard into somebody's life, into their space."
Infra (2010) Richter's 2010 album
Infra takes as its central theme the
2005 terrorist bombings in London, and is an extension of his 25-minute score for a ballet of the same name choreographed by
Wayne McGregor and staged at the
Royal Opera House. Richter expanded his score to create a cycle, taking inspiration from
Franz Schubert's
Winterreisse,
T.S Eliot's "
The Wasteland" and the works of
Wilhelm Müller.
Infra comprises music written for piano, electronics, and string quintet, plus the full performance score and material that developed from the construction of the album. The work comprises of eight movements of varying instrumentation. On the theme, Richter described music as a "catalyzer of a thought; a reflection and I hope people will come to that music in that way." and
The Independent characterised it as "a journey in 13 episodes, emerging from a blur of static and finding its way in a repeated phrase that grows in loveliness".
Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons (2012) Richter's 'recomposed' version of
Vivaldi's
The Four Seasons,
Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons, was premiered in the UK at the
Barbican Centre on 31 October 2012 by the
Britten Sinfonia, conducted by
André de Ridder with violinist
Daniel Hope. The work is an example of "musical borrowing" as coined by musicologist
J. Peter Burkholder, taking something new from a from an existing piece of music and using it in a new piece. It was put on the syllabus of the French
baccalaureate exams in 2019 and 2020, with an accompanying monograph, with the foreword by the national schools inspector stating that musical education "cannot restrict itself to the past". Richter said he had discarded 75% of Vivaldi's original material, but the parts he kept are phased and looped, emphasising his grounding in
postmodern and
minimalist music, and leading one critic to quip parenthetically, "(Perhaps you could call Richter a baroque
decomposer?)." The album topped the
iTunes classical chart in the UK, Germany, and the US. The US launch concert in New York at
Le Poisson Rouge was recorded by
NPR and streamed. Over the four seasons, Richter uses various techniques such as adjusting the tempo, changing the rhythm to something less "regimented" than Vivaldi's original, instructing particular
dynamics, and changing instrumentation, such as a viola swapped to a cello in
Spring 2. Richter has also referred to the musical breaks in the work as "
jump cuts", a cinematic term, used in this instance to describe the breaks creating "leaps" or the sense of a "trap-door opening".
Sleep and From Sleep (2015) In 2015, Richter released his most ambitious project to date, a collaboration with visual artist and creative partner
Yulia Mahr titled
Sleep, an 8.5-hour listening experience targeted to fit a full night's rest. The album contains 31 compositions, most of them 20–30 minutes in duration, all based on variations of 4-5 themes. The music is calm, slow, and mellow, and composed for piano, cello, two violas, two violins, organ, soprano vocals, synthesisers, and electronics. Strings are played by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (Ben Russell, Yuki Numata Resnik, Caleb Burhans, Clarice Jensen, and Brian Snow), vocals are by Grace Davidson, and the piano, synthesisers, and electronics are played by Richter. Richter also released a one-hour version of the project,
From Sleep, that contains roughly one shortened version of every "theme" from Sleep (hence its title) and is supposed to act as a shorter listening experience for the Sleep project. Richter has called
Sleep an eight-hour-long lullaby. The work was strongly influenced by
Gustav Mahler's symphonic works. The entire composition was performed from midnight to 8 A.M. on 27 September 2015 as the climax of the "Science and Music" weekend on
BBC Radio 3. The performance broke several records, including the longest live broadcast of a single musical composition in the network's history.
Jarvis Cocker chose
Sleep as the
BBC Radio 6 album of the year for 2015.
Pitchfork named it one of the 50 best ambient albums of all time. Richter has performed the full-length
Sleep live at the Concertgebouw (Grote Zaal) Amsterdam; the Sydney Opera House; in Berlin (as part of Berliner Festspiele's Maerz Musik Festival); in Madrid (as part of Veranos de la Villa); and in London (at the Barbican). In November 2017,
Sleep was played at the Philharmonie de Paris.
Sleep was performed for its first outdoor performance and largest performance to date in
Los Angeles on 27–28 July and 28–29 July 2018. The performances took place in
Grand Park, opposite
Los Angeles Music Center. Each performance had 560 beds and was timed so the final movement, "Dream 0 (till break of day)", would occur at dawn. Richter played with members of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble. In September 2018,
Sleep was played in the Antwerp cathedral for an audience of 400, who were given beds for the night. In August 2019, it was performed in Helsinki, as part of the
Helsinki Festival, in the tent arena, with half the audience in two-person tents. In March 2025, a full-length performance took place in the
Vienna Arsenal, in the Malersaal, a location normally used as a painter's workshop for opera and stage production decor and backdrops. "I think of it as a piece of protest music," Richter has said. "It's protest music against this sort of very super-industrialised, intense, mechanised way of living right now. It's a political work in that sense. It's a call to arms to stop what we're doing.
Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works (2017) Three Worlds: Music From Woolf Works is Richter's eighth album, released in January 2017. The music is taken from his score for the ballet
Woolf Works, choreographed by
Wayne McGregor at the
Royal Opera House in London, which follows a three-part structure offering evocations of three books by
Virginia Woolf:
Mrs Dalloway,
Orlando, and
The Waves. The album features classical and electronic sound as well as a voice recording of Woolf herself.
Voices (2020) Richter's
Voices project, a collaboration with visual artist
Yulia Mahr, is inspired by the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights and features an 'upside down' orchestra, a concept he developed to reflect his dismay about post-truth politics in the 21st century. The album contains readings of the declaration by
Eleanor Roosevelt and actress
KiKi Layne, with another 70 readings crowd-sourced from around the world. Mahr's accompanying videos deal with the artist's own experiences of migration. The video 'Mercy' won a BAFTA award.
Yo-Yo Ma played the album's opening piece at his concert "A New Equilibrium" honouring the 75th anniversary of the
UN's creation.
Voices 2 (2021) A follow up to
Voices (2020), described as "a more restful, almost ambient affair" compared to the previous album, and reflecting "Richter's dismay with post-truth politics".
Exiles includes extended versions of previously released works such as "The Haunted Ocean", "Infra 5", "Flowers Of Herself", "On The Nature Of Daylight" and "Sunlight". Richter has called the album a serious work because of its subject, which has an emotional texture.
In a Landscape (2025) In A Landscape, Richter’s ninth studio album, was released on September 6, 2025, via Decca Records. The album employs a musical language reminiscent of his seminal work
The Blue Notebooks, with the two records serving as bookends to a defining chapter in his life and career. Conceived as an open dialogue with the listener,
In A Landscape invites reflection on personal dualities and the stories that surface through sound, ultimately extending an invitation to imagination. In conjunction with the release, Richter embarked on his first world tour.
Sleep Circle (2025) In September 2025, to mark the tenth anniversary of his landmark work Sleep, Max Richter released Sleep Circle, a "hallucinatory 90-minute journey into the hypnagogic state", the threshold "between wakefulness and sleep" where dreaming begins. Inspired by performing an abridged version of Sleep live in 2023, Richter revisited the material with a renewed sense of structure and formality, recording the new work at Studio Richter Mahr. The 90-minute duration reflects the length of a typical REM cycle, underscoring Richter’s ongoing exploration of the relationship between music, consciousness, and the human experience of rest. Richter consulted neuroscientist
David Eagleman to better understand the brain entering and during sleep. ==Film and television work==