Even if you're unfamiliar with Max Richter's name, there's a good chance you're more au fait with his music than you perhaps realise.
The German-British composer has been pouring out emotive, often minimalist compositions for the best part of two decades, while his work as a successful movie composer culminated in an Oscar nomination for his score to the much-acclaimed heartbreaker Hamnet earlier this year.
Existentially minded and a proponent of the slow, richly emotive style that you'll find mirrored in the work of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (see The Road, The Assassination of Jesse James et al.), Richter's work on Hamnet felt like the purest evocation of the man's deeply resonant style – mournful, elegiac and designed to elicit just the mildest of existential crises.
The Hamnet score is indeed made lovely by virtue of its overwhelmingly beautiful evocation of loss and despair, but if you want to go full Richter, you'll need to look back in time to a rather more hidden, but no less sparkling, musical gem.
Back in 2017, Christian Bale and Rosamund Pike fronted Scott Cooper's solemn, often grim post-western drama Hostiles, a sparse and oft-brutal work which, while reasonably well received at the time, seems incapable of fully breaking away from the shadows of its relative obscurity.
Following the story of Bale's US cavalry officer escorting a Cheyenne chief back to his home in Montana during the late 19th century, and experiencing increasing guilt and disillusionment with his nation's role in the decimation of the native population, it was exactly the sort of solemn, impactful epic to which Richter could turn his talented hand.
What's so remarkable about Richter's work on Hostiles is that, such is the man's ability to tell a convincing story with nothing but wordless instrumentation, you don't need to have even watched the movie to understand exactly what is being communicated by his accompanying compositions.
Hostiles is well worth a watch, but you can play the entirety of the soundtrack and feel, quite justifiably, that you've experienced the narrative just as fully and splendidly, albeit via the medium of music rather than screen.
Never Goodbye evidences that sublime musical storytelling in its starkest and most evocative terms. An ever-rising, continually building concoction of full, longing strings, Richter's work is its own tale in musical form, packed with the emotions and experiences of a great narrative work communicated with harrowing yet wordless wonder.
Never Goodbye is everything. It's grief and guilt, pain and sorrow, anger and frustration. It's the musical evocation of emotion itself, tracking the way that these tempestuous feelings rise from gentle embers to a raging blaze, from a trickle of water to a torrent that floods everything in its path.
Only the best speakers and headphones will fully do it justice. When those strings really swell and the composition unleashes its ground-shaking power, you need something to communicate fully the awesome emotional power of Richter's masterwork.
The Fyne F502S towers spring to mind as speakers capable of tackling this titanic task. As we said in our review at the time: "The F502S have the nous and nuance to provide the track’s opening piano and strings with the subtle delicacy they require, switching gears as the piece grows and swells to create a powerfully rich, resonant reproduction that fully brings out the music’s haunting resonance."
Never Goodbye is Hostiles' big finale, but Richter's soundtrack is peppered with gems that evoke both the minute internal workings of the film's fractured characters alongside the broader, more existential themes of the world conjured by director Scott Cooper.
The Lord's Rough Ways, for instance, trades the grandeur and scale of Never Goodbye for a quieter, more reflective composition, with fulsome strings replaced by the delicate twinkling of a solitary piano. It's not a complex affair by any stretch, yet such is Richter's talent for extracting so much from seemingly so little, the music practically drips with a sort of deep-rooted sadness that enraptures you from the very first chord.
If you do want to be more technical about things, it also makes for a strong test tune when you just want to discover how well your system or speakers are capable of handling space and subtle detail.
That piano should sit in a well of surrounding silence, and you should be able to track the rise, swell and decay of each keystroke with absolute clarity and precision via a competent set-up. When those piano keys do ebb and decay, they should fall away into a haunting void of nothingness.
If you want the full Hostiles experience – and indeed, want to go the full Max Richter – take an hour out of your day and just play the whole soundtrack from start to finish. Each track is its own mini narrative, but playing the whole composition gives you the richest evocation of Richter's emotive vision playing out before your ears.
What the soundtrack to Hostiles does, through the right system, is remind you not only of music's raw emotional power, but of its capacity as a tool of communication. So often we recommend using test scores and tracks for their pure emotional weight, but with Hostiles, you're seeking something more cohesive and comprehensive. You're going, to use that horrible cliché, on an actual journey.
You're looking for a sense of music telling a story. You're seeking a sense of character, of place, of feelings rising, burning brightly and then fading as they transform into something else entirely. You don't need to have seen the movie: you'll know just what is being said just by listening to the music.
That is the key to all of Max Richter's greatest compositions: that even without words or explanations, they can communicate the most evocative tales. Get them playing on a great system, and those stories will simply tell themselves.
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