Max Richter’s While the Flood Rages Turns Atwood’s Trilogy Into Three Movements

Max Richter’s While the Flood Rages is his third collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor, after Infra and Woolf Works, but it is not a score. Commissioned by the National Ballet of Canada and the Royal Opera House, and drawn from Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, it operates as an homage: a separate object made from the same material, not a document of the stage.

The structure follows the books without illustrating them. Three movements, one per vinyl side, the fourth given to an etching. Atwood’s trilogy turns on a waterless flood, apocalypse as corporate greed, ecological collapse and plague, followed by the rise of bioengineered life. Richter developed the album before COVID gave that vocabulary a different weight.

Water is the entry point. The opening pulse is processed water, the natural shaped to meet the machine, and the orchestra widens that distance as the record proceeds. Piano melodies surface in the title track and recur, doing the work memory does in the novels. By “The City Was a Chaos” the threat has arrived rather than loomed: industrial, percussive, with vibraphone trying to hold a line. “Data Ballistics” is built from gunfire, “Ask the Bees” from a reassuring drone that later thins into a loop. A choir enters as the percussion recedes.

What the album withholds is illustration. It does not act out the catastrophe. It listens to it.