The creator of the most streamed classical album of all time on working with Margaret Atwood, enjoying Eurovision, and uniting people through music

Born in 1966 in Lower Saxony and brought up in Bedford, Max Richter is an award-winning classical composer. Working across live performance, film, dance, art and fashion, he has released nine solo albums, including 2015’s Sleep, an eight-and-a-half-hour work based on the neuroscience of sleeping; 2020’s Voices, inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and In a Landscape, released last month. A new ballet, MaddAddam, a collaboration between Richter and choreographer Wayne McGregor, with Margaret Atwood as a creative consultant, opens at the Royal Opera House on 14 November.

You’ve got a busy autumn ahead. Tell us about In a Landscape first – a more intimate, personal album for you.
It is. It’s an album about polarities, which are all around us in the world, and how we can reconcile them. We live in a time where one of the biggest challenges is that people who have different opinions basically can’t talk to one another any more. This record is a small appeal to try to harmonise these differences, by working with materials that we might think of as in opposition – found sounds and composed music, the human world and the natural world – trying to put these things together in a fruitful relationship.