THE MAX F ACT OR

At the age of six, Max Richter witnessed a global extinction twice in one day.

Watching Walt Disney’s Fantasia at a cinema in Bedford, he saw the rise and fall of the dinosaurs, soundtracked by Stravinsky’s e Rite of Spring It was the first time he truly appreciated music’s extraordinary power of connection. It showed him that there was more to life than listening to his parents’ Bach records, being bullied at school for being a red-haired immigrant and hating your piano teacher for hi ing you with a ruler.

As soon as the lights came on, Richter – a cripplingly shy child – asked his mother to take him to the second showing.

He started to compose his own future Fi y years later, Richter sits in the custom-built Studio Richter Marr, not far from Soho Farmhouse in Oxfordshire, which he planned for two decades with his wife Yulia. e former alpaca farm now caters to his every creative need, with space for a 30-piece orchestra, huts for the resident musicians, a Yamaha grand piano and a steampunk’s

Given the global range of his work, he is an unabashed fan of Soho House, regularly visiting the Houses in Malibu, Hollywood, New York and Toronto. “First of all, love the conviviality of it. It’s a place where you encounter lots of interesting people. Secondly, it’s also a place where you can sort of tuck yourself away from the racket that’s going on out there and just hibernate for a moment. I travel quite a bit, so I love that feeling of recognition and being ‘home’.”

By Andy Morris

Richter is also adjusting to his new global status, including those fans who first heard On the Nature of Daylight during episode three of HBO’s fatal fungus drama e Last of Us “I think of it as a tremendous privilege when anything like that happens. I’m not precious about how people encounter the work. I think every piece has got many doorways into it, whether that’s through a concert, a ballet, a TV show or a movie. People encounter it in their own way and they find a place for that piece of work in their life, in their own way.” For Richter, art must still be focused on powerful ideas and emotions. “Music dream of synths from the mid-1970s. There are no clocks on the walls.

Richter himself has the measured response of the very smart and the half-Germanic: he comes from the Brian Eno school of elegant, profound bo ins. “I think of my studio a bit like a compost heap,” he explains, nodding to the packed bookshelves and recording devices. “It’s a place which is sort of fecund and pregnant with potential. Having all these objects can catalyse ideas in unexpected ways, which is a fun part of doing creative work, isn’t it?”

Richter is certainly having a lot of fun. He is arguably the most popular contemporary classical music composer and his work has been streamed over 3.3 billion times. Signed to the austere Deutsche Grammophon, he’s spent his career pushing sonic boundaries, including writing an eight-hour lullaby called Sleep and reclaiming Vivaldi’s Four Seasons from hold-music hell. Today he is working simultaneously on four separate projects: a film with Chernobyl’s Johan Renck, the soundtrack for a TV series, a production at the Royal Opera House in London and a performance under the huge Lovell Telescope this summer.

Above: Richter and his ensemble performing in Berlin is not a job. Music is a 24/7 way of existing. It allows me to express the things that matter to me without having to say them in words, and to be able to say them in di erent ways.” As his preferred method of communication, he also doesn’t take the easy route. As a young boy, he was introduced to the band Kraftwerk by a nature documentary that featured Autobahn – he wrote to the BBC, identified the record and then proceeded to build his first synthesiser aged 13. When he became bored with school, he started reading Byron, Joyce, Pound and Elliot under his own steam, then got a job at an overnight garage and would take mischievous delight in reading e Waste Land over the tannoy. Such unusual behaviour was rewarded karmically; in his late teens his milkman heard him practising and started dropping o experimental Phillip Glass albums to his house for him to check out.

He also wasn’t afraid of creative setbacks. Richter’s debut album, Memoryhouse, released in 2002, was recorded with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra for the short-lived BBC Late Junction classical music label. ere was, in his own words: “No advertising, no reviews, no performances.” Sales were so bad that at one point, his family had to move house. He took ma ers into his own hands. “I wanted to be a classical music composer. But no one was interested in what I was doing, because it didn’t fit in with what classical music was supposed to be. So had zero opportunities to hear my work and actually got into recording as a kind of act of expediency.”

For Richter, live music is still of paramount importance – a next-level experience. “Live music is about a community of people coming together to play, and a community of people coming together to listen. It’s real time, in that moment, in that room uniquely, once and once only.” Recently, he was asked by Dior creative director Kim Jones to perform at the pyramids in Egypt. “It was just extraordinary in every way. We took an orchestra of 24. ey built a stage for us and as a backdrop, we had the three pyramids of Giza. Dior have this incredible passion: they’re really aiming for the best that they can possibly do. ere’s no compromising on anything. They asked me at one point, “What colour do you want the pyramids, Max?” I hadn’t really thought about that.”

Sleep: Tranquility Base by Max Richter is available now via Deutsche Grammophon

Francesca Hayward

WITH THE HAYWARD DINING CHAIR

Royal Ballet principal dancer Francesca Hayward has been dancing since she was just three, when her grandparents showed her a video of e Nutcracker and she became, in her own words, “Totally hooked. When I’m dancing, forget all my problems and just tune in with myself. It’s emotionally cathartic.”

Francesca joined the Royal Ballet in 2010, dancing in shows such as Swan Lake and e Nutcracker (a full-circle moment). You might also recognise her as Victoria in Tom Hooper’s 2019 film Cats

By Chloe Lawrance

Photography by Rick Guest

Styling by Ayishat Akanbi

Shirt and shoes, Hayward’s own. Hayward dining chair, £495, Soho Home

We asked a few Soho House members – who just happen to be some of the most exciting figures in the world of movement – to prove that our great chairs are for more than just si ing in