Max Richter’s While the Flood Rages finds hope in the wreckage

In this developing dystopia, the survival of human emotions and of the natural environment are in doubt, but Richter’s emphasis on the evolution of a new humanity in response to mechanised terror is clear and heartening. The opening track, “Wave After Wave”, stresses the notion of transformation as the beautiful theme from “Europe, After the Rain” from his first album, Memoryhouse (2002), is -nearly a quarter of a century later, in a time of far greater environmental crisis- given a darker, much more threatening rendering. The alternating between the delicate and the violent is, from this point on, a pattern across the album, with the orchestral and the electronic converging and diverging, presenting symbiosis turning to unease and then a tension with the potential for creativity or destruction. Certainly, it’s an ambitious project, but Richter’s fine sense of dramatic structure over three Acts ensures it never drifts into the hubristic. Here are harmony and discord, not always in opposition but consistently with a sense of some unease, bringing a fearfully effective balance. One does not need a significant knowledge of Atwood’s novels to comprehend the musical ideas, as the accomp...