Max Richter’s While the Flood Rages finds hope in the wreckage

In this developing dystopia, the survival of human emotions and of the natural environment are in doubt, but Richter’s emphasis on the evolution of a new humanity in response to mechanised terror is clear and heartening.

The opening track, “Wave After Wave”, stresses the notion of transformation as the beautiful theme from “Europe, After the Rain” from his first album, Memoryhouse (2002), is -nearly a quarter of a century later, in a time of far greater environmental crisis- given a darker, much more threatening rendering. The alternating between the delicate and the violent is, from this point on, a pattern across the album, with the orchestral and the electronic converging and diverging, presenting symbiosis turning to unease and then a tension with the potential for creativity or destruction.

Certainly, it’s an ambitious project, but Richter’s fine sense of dramatic structure over three Acts ensures it never drifts into the hubristic. Here are harmony and discord, not always in opposition but consistently with a sense of some unease, bringing a fearfully effective balance.

One does not need a significant knowledge of Atwood’s novels to comprehend the musical ideas, as the accompanying booklet is appropriately informative, offering relevant narrative and intelligent commentary. It highlights key themes, such as the role of a genetically-engineered, though essentially benign (conveyed by the gentleness of “Their Eerie Music”), humanoid population living alongside the citizenry in a post-apocalyptic world.

The calmness of the piano melody of the title track suggests that even in the most worrying of scenes humanity can exist and offer hope in whatever the future might hold. And that is certainly reassuring as the industrial and the glitchy of “The City Was a Chaos” displaces the hitherto predominantly calm, until “”Quiet” with its echo of the well-known “On the Nature of Daylight” from 2004’s The Blue Notebooks restores the placid.

The central Act initially conveys some environmental optimism, characterised by the buzzing of bees. Yet, this bucolic harmony is brutally shot to pieces by the sound of guns from media-reported warzones. Richter, throughout, illustrates the vulnerability and fragility of the lived environment though the vigorous, at times violent, interrupting of the pastoral, and tracks such as “Data Ballistics” leave one in little doubt about the power of a bellicose industrial corporatism, yet even here some kind of harmony, however uncertain, can persist through the combination of choir and electronica in “Oh Let Me Not Be Proud” and then an altered (evolved?) version of “Quiet” follows in “Sweet Air”.

The evolutionary theme develops in the final Act, from “Dawn” onwards with an indication of newness and optimism, alongside the notion that even against “Background Radiation” (the following track, with its Geiger-like sonics), life can adapt and eventually thrive, as in the re-wilding of the area around Chernobyl in recent times. An optimistic collective harmony, musical and social, concludes with “Now We Can Sing”, incorporating a re-capitulation of motifs from “Quiet” and “Sweet Air”, the electronic almost completely giving way to an orchestral crescendo in a surging affirmation of belief.