Max Richter’s VOICES 2 Now Available
Max Richter’s VOICES 2, the second album in the cutting-edge audio-visual VOICES project, inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is out now on Decca Records.
VOICES 2 follows from its first part, the unfolding project embodying the Universal Declaration’s aspiration to build a better and fairer world. There are no spoken words in VOICES 2, only singing among the instrumentation. The music is about hope for the future.
Max Richter’s music has the extraordinary ability to communicate and inspire deep emotion and contemplation, whether it’s through the celestial choral vocals soaring above the cello on ‘Psychogeography’ and the bass-heavy strings and keys of the expansive ‘Follower’, the circling organs of ‘Solitaries’ or the elegiac viola of ‘Prelude 2’.
Also, BAFTA-winning artist and filmmaker Yulia Mahr reveals her new video for Prelude 2 from Max Richter’s VOICES 2.
The Prelude 2 video is an artistic response to our turbulent times and highlights the plight of refugees. The inherent beauty in Yulia Mahr’s imagery is contrasted with harsh brutality of war and global turmoil. The film also is a metaphor for the sensation of drowning that people feel when overwhelmed. Despite its sombre mood, positivity runs throughout: a sense of potential in a future as yet unwritten.
The powerful themes of humanitarianism running through VOICES and single Prelude 2 were informed by Yulia’s own upbringing and childhood experiences. She was born in Hungary, at the time, under communist rule and raised by her grandmother, a translator, fluent in five languages. Herself a refugee during the Second World War, she fled to Chile where she worked with and befriended Allende, Neruda and Che Guevara. She raised Yulia in Budapest and her deep humanitarianism and warmth fed the inspiration for VOICES.
Yulia says her grandmother remained a humanitarian throughout her life – helping refugees and being part of an international movement towards peace, adding “In the end my own convoluted story saw my mother and I replicating the large scale migrations of the 20th century and I arrived in the UK – lonely, confused and desperate for security. While I could rarely see my grandmother after that – her spirit has never left me and it is this spirit that informed the conception and writing of VOICES.”
Max Richter’s Voices 1 & 2 Coloured Vinyl 4-LP Set is now available at Classics Direct
