Max Richter to perform 8-hour Sleep album at the Great Wall of China

Max Richter’s 8-hour composition Sleep will be performed for the first time in Asia next month, as part of the 22nd Beijing Music Festival. Just 300 concertgoers will hear the British-German composer’s work performed overnight at the Great Wall of China.

Designed to soundtrack the entirety of a full night’s sleep, the performance will feature Richter on piano alongside soprano Grace Davidson and the American Contemporary Music Ensemble.

“It’s a special highlight of the upcoming festival. This piece is quite popular in Europe and in the United States,” says the festival’s artistic director, Zou Shuang.

One of Richter’s most well-known works, Sleep garnered great interest worldwide when it was released in 2015.

Full shows, performed to audiences sitting in beds, have been staged in iconic locations across the world, including the Sydney Opera House, the Philharmonie de Paris and outdoors at the Los Angeles Music Centre nearby Grand Park.

Perhaps the only classical concert where listeners are openly invited to nod off, Sleep was developed with the US neuroscientist David Eagleman to learn about how the brain functions during sleep.

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“Sleeping is one of the most important things we all do … We spend a third of our lives asleep and it’s always been one of my favourite things, ever since I was a child. … For me, Sleep is an attempt to see how that space when your conscious mind is on holiday can be a place for music to live,” Richter said after the inaugural Sleep concert in London.

The inaugural concert broke world records for both the longest broadcast of a single piece of music and longest live broadcast of a single piece of music.

The popularity of Sleep and its unconventional staging is a double-edged sword for Richter, who has found himself inundated with requests from around the globe to preform the challenging concert.

Sleep shows are “a nightmare” that take a physical toll upon Richter, he told the Post last November, ahead of his debut performance in Hong Kong.

“You have to get jet-lagged the right amount beforehand, so then when I go onstage it’s morning for me. And just the performance itself – I’m sitting there for eight hours with 250 pages of piano music to play – is physically hard,” he said.

Richter is credited with making classical music feel relevant and exciting for younger generations.

From reworking Vivaldi’s famed Four Seasons and scoring an episode of dystopian television series Black Mirror to releasing an album of pieces intended to be used as ringtones, Richter’s touch is embedded in popular culture.

As well as his work on film scores, including Arrival and Mary Queen of Scots, Richter is known for his often avant-garde modern classical compositions that skewer a particular political or cultural theme, such as his 2004 album “The Blue Notebooks”, inspired by the Iraq war.

As awareness grows around the disruptive effects of staring at screens late into the evening, Sleep was created to encourage listeners to switch off and drift away.

“I made Sleep out of my own intuition about what was happening to us – it’s the idea that we’re data-saturated by social media. Those are the things I was feeling when I wrote the piece,” Richter said.

Max Richter will perform Sleep on Friday 4 October from 10pm to 6am at the Great Wall, Beijing. For more information.