Former US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt among voices to feature on Max Richter's latest album

It’s more than a decade since Max Richter first began contemplating a classical album based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Initially prompted by the controversy surrounding the US incarceration of alleged war criminals at Guantanamo Bay, Richter composed a short piece called Mercy but an expanded choral work, featuring dozens of voices, took years to realise. Finally, 72 years on from the adoption of the Declaration by the United Nations General Assembly, it has found its time and place.

In challenging times, he feels the Declaration, although not perfect, is a document that represents an “inspiring vision for the possibility of a better and kinder world”. He wanted his album, Voices, to be “a place to think and reflect”.

“I wanted to make a piece which wasn’t about the problems but was about the potential solutions, so something hopeful,” explains the 54-year-old, who is one of contemporary classical music’s best-selling composers. “The more time I spent thinking about the Declaration, the more I felt while it isn’t a perfect document, it is a document 70 years old, but it feels nevertheless something very hopeful and about the future.”

Among the 70 or so voices on the record are Eleanor Roosevelt, the longest-serving First Lady of the United States and prominent activist, and the American actor Kiki Layne. “What a force of nature that woman was,” Richter says of Roosevelt. “She achieved incredible things and basically got the Declaration written one way and another. Then you have Kiki Layne whose voice I heard in If Beale Street Could Talk, it’s a film that she narrates and she has a young voice, I wanted her voice to be about the future.”

The rest of the readings were crowd-sourced. “We thought about that really as a way to embed the idea of universality and the democratic into the structure of the piece,” Richter says.

“That was in a way relatively simple. We just put the call out on social media and hey presto, hundreds of recordings. That people responded so warmly and generously to that in a way attests to the fact that this text means a lot to people, that was wonderful.”

With basic human rights currently under threat in places like Hong Kong, Syria and Myanmar, the timing of this album seems apposite. Yet Richter says he did not intend to make a political point. “I don’t think of it as a political statement because I think human rights are more fundamental than that. They are the bedrock of civilisation, and that’s what I like so much about the Universal Declaration. It’s a humane document and it’s also something which I think accords with our sense of natural justice”

Richter utilised an ‘upside down’ orchestra on the recording, including 12 double basses, 24 cellos, six violas, eight violins and a harp. “The standard orchestra is in a way a microcosm of how people thought society should be built in the 18th and 19th centuries. There’s a man standing at the front telling everyone what to do. I felt that this was an opportunity to subvert that and again embed the democratic into the piece by just shuffling that.

“The other thing I wanted to do is reflect my sense that the world has been turned upside down in the last ten years or so actually in the sound itself, so basically it’s almost all bass instruments, rather than upper strings and high melody instruments. It’s a metaphor, elevating something out of the dark material. That is the world we’re living in right now, we’re facing huge challenges, socially, politically, environmentally, in terms of technology, in terms of economics.

“It feels like the fire is burning everywhere at the moment; nevertheless these problems are human problems, we made them. This is the idea really that we can also solve them. After all, we always have choices, we just have to make the right decisions.”

There’s an optimism at the heart of Voices, he says. “While it’s true that we’re in a terrible mess in all kinds of ways, there is also an increasing awareness that things can’t go on the way they are. I think there is an activist spirit especially among younger people which is very encouraging.”

As well as the album, Richter is launching a new app based on his monumental eight-hour work Sleep, which enables users to create personalised musical sessions for a chosen period, with planetary animations programmed to Sleep’s musical themes.

“It’s taken a long time for the technology to be ready for it,” he says. “The thing about Sleep is it’s music as a tool and I’m very interested in extending that utility into the personal, an increasing democratisation of that material. Obviously I wrote the piece to be experienced while sleeping but people use that music in all kinds of ways, so it extends the potential for that.”

Voices is out now on Decca Records. maxrichtermusic.com

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