Max Richter announces Voices 2 album with lead cut "Mirrors"

Richter's Voices album was released in July last year, and today (17 February) the composer has returned to announce the next chapter of the project with an album called Voices 2.

The Grammy-nominated composer has shared new song "Mirrors" as the lead outing from Voices 2, which is accompanied by a video from Yulia Mahr. Mahr says, "Since the theme of Voices 2 is the future we wish to write, I chose to concentrate on the topic of re-birth, a new Spring. Hope. The flowers are all negative versions of themselves - out of the negative can be born a future that is full of beauty and the positive. History is not inevitable."

The music of Voices 2 was recorded during the original sessions and features the same band. Additional sessions took place during lockdown, with Richter recording solo piano music in the deserted Studio 1 at Abbey Road.

Richter says of Voices 2, "One of the things that was really striking, when we premiered the music, was that even though everyone knows of the Declaration, not many people have actually read it or spent time with it. The overwhelming comment we had from the audience was ‘it’s amazing to hear that text’. If people can have time to experience that text, and then in the second part of the record really spend time thinking about it, that for me is a perfect outcome."

He adds, "There are always opportunities for new beginnings. And that's one of the things that's so hopeful about that text. It lays out a very fundamental and simple set of principles, which are completely available to us at all times, but we do have to choose them. That's the challenge, isn't it?"

Referring back to the important topic of Human Rights, which is what Voices is built on, Richter says, "Issues of rights pop up around the world all the time. Things have changed for the better in the States. On the other hand, Brexit has happened, which involved a loss of fundamental rights on the part of people who live in the UK. And all around the world, if we think of what's going on in China, and in all sorts of parts of Asia and in the Middle East, these are hot topics. So keeping the principles of the Declaration really front and center is important work."

On returning to Voices 2 following last year's Voices, Richter adds, "It's like going into a familiar building. There's something relaxing about it. In a sense, the music revisits the same space, it’s continuous. Much like walking around a sculpture, you discover new facets in the same object by spending time looking at it. That's the process I'm trying to elicit in the music, by revisiting those structures and forms continuously in different ways to have a deeper relationship with that material and I guess, by analogy, with the text."