Forget the Oscars, this understated western has some of the best songs I’ve ever heard
Even if you’re not familiar with Max Richter’s name, there’s a good chance you’ll fall in love with his music more than you might think.
The German-British composer has been churning out emotive, often understated compositions for the better part of two decades, while his career as a successful film composer culminated in an Oscar nomination for his score to the heartbreakingly popular Person. Hamnet earlier this year.
An existentialist and proponent of the slow, emotive style you find exemplified in the work of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (see Street, The Assassination of Jesse James et al.), Richter’s work continues Hamnet it felt like the purest expression of a strong man’s style – sad, flamboyant and designed to evoke existential issues.
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I Hamnet the score is made lovely by its hauntingly beautiful evocation of loss and despair, but if you want to get your fill of Richter, you’ll need to look back in time for a more subtle, yet brilliant musical gem.
Back in 2017, Christian Bale and Rosamund Pike fronted Scott Cooper’s dramedy, a typically dark western. Enemies, a sparse and often brutal work that, while well received at the time, seems unable to break free from the shadow of its obscurity.
Following the story of Bale’s American cavalry officer escorting a Cheyenne chief back to his home in Montana in the late 19th century, and dealing with growing guilt and disappointment over his tribe’s role in the extermination of a native population, it was the kind of modest, impactful epic that Richter was able to turn his skillful hand to.
What is remarkable about Richter’s work Enemies that is, such is the man’s ability to tell a convincing story without sounding wordless bells, you don’t even have to watch the movie to understand exactly what his accompanying songs are saying.
Enemies it’s worth seeing, but you can play the whole song and feel, rightfully so, that you’ve experienced the full and dramatic narrative, albeit using the form of music rather than screen.
Never Say Goodbye proof that high-quality musical storytelling is your strong and provocative lyrics. An ever-rising, ever-creating combination of full, yearning strings, Richter’s work is its own fairy tale in musical form, full of the emotion and experience of a grand narrative work linked by a sad but wordless wonder.
Never Say Goodbye you are everything. Grief and guilt, pain and sorrow, anger and frustration. It is an evocation of emotional music itself, tracing how these stormy emotions rise from soft coals to raging fires, from flowing rivers to rivers that sweep away everything in its path.
Only the best speakers and headphones will do you full justice. When those strings really swell and the composition unleashes its moving power, you need something to fully communicate the incredible emotional power of Richter’s artwork.
The Fyne F502S towers come to mind as speakers that can handle this big task. As we said in our review at the time: “The F502S has the nous and nuance to provide the opening track’s piano and strings with the subtle sweetness they need, shifting gears as the piece grows and swells to create a richly powerful, resonant reproduction that fully expresses the music’s haunting twang.”
Never Say Goodbye is something Enemies‘ is a grand finale, but Richter’s score is full of gems that evoke both the small inner workings of the film’s broken characters alongside the broader, existential themes woven by director Scott Cooper.
The ways of the Lord are hard, for example, it trades in size and scale Never Say Goodbye for a quiet, shimmering, full-stringed composition replaced by the soft twinkling of a piano solo. It’s not a complex story by any means, yet Richter’s ability to pull off so much of what appears to be so little, the music drips with the kind of deep sadness that grabs you from the start.
If you want to get more technical about things, it also makes for a solid test tune if you want to find out how your system or speakers can handle space and subtle details.
That piano should sit in a quiet ambient environment, and you should be able to track the rise, swell and decay of each keystroke with clarity and precision with a skillful setup. When those piano keys decay and decay, they must fall into a wondrous nothingness.
If you want the full Enemies experience – and really, you want to do the perfect Max Richter – take an hour out of your day and just play the whole song from start to finish. Each song is its own little narrative, but playing every song gives you a rich re-enactment of Richter’s emotional vision playing out before your ears.
What is the song Enemies do it, with the right arrangement, it evokes not only the raw power of music, but its power as a communication tool. We often recommend using test scores and tracks for their pure emotional weight, but with Enemies, you want something cohesive and inclusive. You’re going to use that awful phrase, on a real trip.
You want a musical experience that tells a story. You want a sense of character, of place, of rising emotions, burning brightly and then fading as they transform into something else entirely. You don’t need to see the movie: you’ll know what’s being said by listening to the music.
That’s the key to all of Max Richter’s greatest songs: that even without words or descriptions, they can tell evocative tales. They played in a great show, and those stories will tell for themselves.
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