Three Worlds – Music from Woolf Works presents music from Woolf Works, an award-winning ballet triptych that reunited
Max Richter with his Infra collaborator, choreographer
Wayne McGregor. Like Infra, which paid tribute to
T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and
Schubert's Winterreise,
Woolf Works is an homage to three of Virginia Woolf's greatest novels: Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves. And, like his previous collaboration with
McGregor,
Three Worlds is a striking testament to how eloquently
Richter translates the work of an artist working in another medium into compelling music. As he captures the depth and breadth of the worlds Woolf created with her writing, he reflects on his own body of work. Following an excerpt of "Craftsmanship," the only surviving recording of Woolf's voice (and another reminder of how deftly
Richter combines spoken word and found sounds into his music),
Three Worlds begins with Dalloway-inspired pieces. The interplay of strings and piano on "Meeting Again" is quintessentially
Richter, the tension between structure and aching emotions echoing his breakthrough
The Blue Notebooks; meanwhile, the flowing sweetness of "In the Garden"is filled with as many poignant details as the novel that inspired it. Later, "War Anthem" evokes the novel's tragic World War I veteran Septimus Smith with its distant -- but still ominous -- drums.
Richter's flair for incorporating electronics into his music comes to the fore on the Orlando portion of
Three Worlds, arguably the album's most exciting stretch. He echoes the daring, unexpected life of the novel's gender-swapping protagonist with short, brisk pieces that move with too much purpose to be merely whimsical: "Modular Astronomy" sounds like it's streaking through time and space, while the arpeggios on "The Genesis of Poetry" trace clearly defined arcs. The Orlando pieces also show off
Richter's impressive range, spanning the echoing drones of "Morphology" and the elegantly futuristic mesh of electronics and strings on "The Explorers." This part of
Three Worlds could easily be an album in its own right, something that could also be said of its final section, The Waves. Prefaced by a reading of Woolf's suicide note by Gillian Anderson, "Tuesday" closes the album with slowly unfolding strings, brass, and vocals that are somehow unsettling in their steadiness, mirroring the concept of shared consciousness in the novel. While the album's finale may lose something without the ballet's visuals, it's still striking. Coming after the epic length and ambition of
Sleep,
Three Worlds could seem like a more minor work, but in its own right, it's another triumphant reminder of
Richter's brilliance as a translator and creator. ~ Heather Phares