The Blue Notebooks (20 Year Edition)

Max Richter had never even been to the Glastonbury Festival before he opened the Park Stage on Saturday 24 June 2023. He and his string ensemble were joined by Oscar-winning actress Tilda Swinton for a full-length performance of The Blue Notebooks, Richter’s second album, originally released in 2004. Photos from the Glastonbury gig now feature in the 20th-anniversary vinyl edition of The Blue Notebooks.

The set of 2 crystal-clear vinyl LPs is packaged in a newly-designed blue gatefold sleeve, with a six-page booklet and art card. Available only in a limited and exclusive hand-numbered edition, it includes all the tracks from the expanded 2018 edition, together with the This Bitter Earth/On The Nature Of Daylight mash-up – appearing for the first time on vinyl – and a brand-new solo piano version of On The Nature Of Daylight.

Its title inspired by The Blue Octavo Notebooks, a collection of writings by Franz Kafka, The Blue Notebooks was composed in 2003. Introducing it to the Glastonbury crowd last year, Max Richter said, “It’s kind of a protest record, a response to what was happening in politics around the build-up to the Iraq war where I was really struck with doubt about what was happening. And I thought about Kafka, who’s the patron saint of doubt, and I thought about making a piece which expressed everything, and so we recorded this.”

Written for strings and electronics, Richter’s meditative tracks are structured around Tilda Swinton’s readings from Kafka and the work of Polish poet Czesław Miłosz.