Max Richter: Infra / Julius Eastman: Stay On It

An ocean of sounds

What began in 2008 as a project with the Royal Ballet in London – an answer to the 2005 London terror attacks through music and dance – grew on Max Richter’s vibrant musical horizon into a whole album: »Infra« is a hypnotic sound landscape that revolves around the phenomenon of memory. Somnambulistic stages follow one after the other, diving deeper and deeper into an ocean of electronic and acoustic sounds, string melodies and minimal elements – punctuated by Morse code, radio waves and vibrating bass.

The second half of the concert pays tribute to the African-American composer Julius Eastman (1940–1990), who died far too young. His work »The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc« (1981), which oscillates between mania and ecstasy, was lost when he slipped into a swamp of drugs, alcohol and homelessness. This powerful arrangement for ten cellists is based on a recording of the piece that luckily survived. The programme also features the minimal-influenced »Stay On It«, a great example of Eastman’s layer-cake-like composition technique of »organic music«.