Max Richter with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble Tickets

Max Richter's ninth solo album—the first to be written and recorded at his serene new studio in rural Oxfordshire—is a fleeting self-portrait of a musician in constant motion. In A Landscape is a record about “reconciling polarities,” as Richter puts it, bringing together the electronic and the acoustic, the human and the natural world, the big questions of life, and the quiet pleasures of living.

Shifting focus to Richter’s immediate surroundings, In A Landscape marks out a psychic space in which to meditate on the present while recognizing a lifetime of artistic influence, from Bach and Purcell to the poetry of Keats, Wordsworth, and Anne Carson. “It’s me having a look around, trying to examine where I'm at,” he suggests, “like a memoir of the present moment.”

From its darkly enveloping prelude (“They Will Shade Us With Their Wings”) to the somber elaboration of 17th century English composer John Eccles (“Love Song”), the album deepens Richter’s lifelong search for both “emotional directness and beautifully made things”. Luminous piano whorls (“A Colour Field”) and pensive electronic clouds (“Only Silent Words”) bring opposing energies together with the lightest touch: “The music feels very simple, but nothing is there by chance; all the notes are where I very carefully placed them.”

After spending many years grappling with big ideas and thorny social and political questions, the making of In A Landscape has opened up another greener world for Richter. Making music remains, above all, “a way to make a kind of alternate reality,” a constructed world “where everything is in its place.”