The instrumental piece “Sleep”, by the composer Max Richter, with more than eight hours of duration, will be broadcast simultaneously, between Saturday and Monday, on radio stations of 20 countries, announced the musician.
“Five years ago I wrote ‘Sleep’ as an invitation to take a break from our busy lives. Now we face an unexpected and unwanted stop [because of the covid-19 pandemic]. It is not easy to adapt to this new normality, which daily brings anxiety and suffering “, says Max Richter on the official page.
For this reason, the musician has partnered with 17 radio stations, which are part of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), and other stations in the United States, Canada and New Zealand, for a collective broadcast of that composition during the Easter weekend. .
Thus, the instrumental composition will be transmitted during the night and early morning, between Saturday and Monday, thus coinciding with the listeners’ sleep time, on radios such as BBC Radio 3 (United Kingdom), RAI Radio 3 (Italy) ), France Musique (France) or LRT Klasika (Lithuania).
Despite belonging to EBU, Antena 2 will not transmit the composition, as explained to the Lusa agency the director of the public station, João Almeida.
The recording that will be broadcast on radio stations was made in 2015 for the BBC, with Max Richter (piano, synthesizers) accompanied by a small ‘ensemble’, with soprano Gace Davidson and instrumentalists Natália Bonner, Stebe Morris (violin), Reiad Chibah (viola), Ian Burdge and Chris Worsey (cello).
Holland, Spain, Denmark and Belgium are other countries that will transmit the composition.
“Sleep”, eight and a half hours long, was released on album by Deutsche Grammophon in 2015 and presented by Max Richter as a lullaby, “a manifesto for a more leisurely existence”.