#4440: Max Richter’s ‘Voices’ On Human Rights Day

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On Human Rights Day, Dec. 10, German composer, keyboardist, and producer Max Richter and Yulia Mahr, who is his creative partner and a BAFTA-winning film maker, joined host John Schaefer to talk about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on Dec. 10, 1948, which inspired Richter's ambitious piece Voices. Plus, listen to the whole work, performed live in London at the BBC’s Maida Vale studio by The Max Richter Ensemble, with chorus, narrator Sheila Atim, and violin soloist Viktoria Mullova, as well as crowd-sourced recorded voices in many languages reading the Declaration.

Richter said in an interview with NPR about Voices that "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is this extraordinary document which comes out of another dark time, the Second World War, where the world was basically in ruins, in ashes. And yet these people came together under Eleanor Roosevelt and wrote a blueprint for a better world, and I think that's a wonderful human achievement. And there's something very inspiring and hopeful about that text."