While the Flood Rages began with music for a ballet about a world altered by catastrophe. Max Richter then reshaped that material into an album, released on 16 October 2026. Knowing that journey gives the piano, voices and electronics a dramatic context beyond a collection of individual tracks.
Illustrative dance photograph: Miguel Rodriguez León / Pexels. This is not a production photograph of MADDADDAM.
An album with a life beyond the ballet
In the release announcement, Richter explains that he rearranged the material to create a sequence that works through listening alone. The record is a companion to MADDADDAM, rather than a promise to reproduce every moment of the stage performance.
That distinction changes what to expect. In a theatre, a gesture, a lighting change or a character’s arrival can give a musical event its meaning. With an album, the listener has to find relationships through the sound and the order in which it arrives. You can approach this record without having read the novels or seen the choreography.
The single “Now We Can Sing” is an accessible place to start exploring the project. Here is the visualiser from Richter’s official channel; the full album is available through his listening links.
The world behind MADDADDAM
Wayne McGregor’s ballet draws on Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam. The choreographer’s production record dates its premiere to Toronto on 23 November 2022, as a co-production of the National Ballet of Canada and The Royal Ballet. Atwood was the creative consultant, with Richter writing the commissioned score.
Three novels do not translate into three neatly corresponding acts. In artistic director Hope Muir’s introduction, the ballet moves through three different perspectives. Castaway begins after the catastrophe, following Jimmy and the engineered beings known as Crakers. Extinctathon moves through the circumstances and choices that preceded it. Dawn imagines a later society preserving fragments of the past as stories and ritual.
This is useful background because it makes room for several kinds of musical time: recollection, immediate danger and an imagined future. A return need not mean that nothing has changed. Something familiar can appear in a different world, with a different significance.
The National Ballet of Canada’s trailer gives a glimpse of that stage world. It introduces the ballet’s visual language, rather than documenting the making of the album.
Why the small musical ideas matter
Richter’s comments on the National Ballet’s production page describe a score spanning orchestral music, electronics, experimental sounds and techno, while also needing to work on the scale of one or two instruments. That range is part of the conception of the piece, rather than a reason to expect one consistent background mood.
In his Apple Music Classical interview, Richter places the title track at the work’s intimate centre. His explanation concerns ordinary tenderness continuing within events so large that they become history. The personal and the collective can coexist; the quiet passage does not have to deny the surrounding catastrophe.
“It’s like the eye of the storm.”
Max Richter, discussing the title track with Apple Music Classical.
The label’s account also identifies a falling piano motif in “Quiet” that returns in altered settings, including “Now We Can Sing.” That gives you a specific relationship to investigate. Listen for what makes an idea recognisable: its direction, its rhythm, the spacing of its notes, or some combination of those features.
Then ask what surrounds it. Does a change of instrument make the idea seem closer or more distant? Does a thicker accompaniment change which part of the phrase holds your attention? These are questions to take to the recording, rather than a note-for-note transcription or a claim that every return is identical.
A route through the first listen
Begin with three points of reference, then return to the album’s running order. The purpose is to give your ear something to follow without turning the music into a test.
- “While the Flood Rages”: keep Richter’s description of intimacy in mind. Notice what gives a passage that impression for you: the number of parts, the space around a line, the way one sound answers another.
- “Quiet”: use the piano motif identified in the release notes as a listening anchor. Try retaining its contour before moving on. You do not need to name every pitch to notice a relationship later.
- “Now We Can Sing”: revisit the single after the earlier material. Ask whether its role feels different when you have heard what precedes it. Recognition and a satisfying ending are related questions, but they are not automatically the same thing.
The materials elsewhere on the record add another dimension. The release notes describe processed ocean sound in “Wave After Wave,” recordings of technological systems in the electronic material, and manipulated gunfire in “Data Ballistics.” Knowing a sound’s source can change the associations you bring to it. You can also listen once before reading those descriptions, then compare the experience.
Choose one question per pass. Following the piano’s contour and following changes in density are different listening jobs; trying to catalogue everything at once can make both harder. Our post on listening more critically uses the same practical idea of directing attention, in the context of your own playing.
A continuing conversation between words, movement and sound
This collaboration has a useful predecessor in Woolf Works. The Royal Ballet’s introduction describes Richter combining orchestra and electronics with fragments of Virginia Woolf’s words, including her recorded voice. Literary material can enter music as language, dramatic structure or atmosphere; it does not always have to become a sequence of illustrated scenes.
The same distinction matters when looking for music to play. A ballet score, a listening album and a piano arrangement can be related while serving different purposes. Our post on Hisaishi’s soundtrack, concert suite and piano scores follows another example of that journey. A familiar title is a starting point for finding the version you want.
For anyone interested in seeing MADDADDAM on stage, The Royal Ballet lists a London run from 22 February to 13 March 2027. The album can stand on its own before then. Start with its sequence, keep the larger dramatic world in mind, and let a returning idea acquire meaning from what has happened around it.
