Grinning in the sunshine from his garden just outside Tallinn, Järvi reminisces about his early childhood in Estonia in the 1970s, looking out towards Finland, a beacon of freedom that lay frustratingly out of reach on the other side of the Gulf. When the conductor Kristjan Järvi describes the orchestra he founded in 2008 he calls it “youthful” and “naive” a vagabond collective that seeks to “erase the borders between east and west”. Photograph: Sunbeam Productions/ Siiri Kumari ‘This whole idea of exiles is a story of humanity’.

Yet Richter tells me, on a video call from his home in Oxfordshire, that it remains relevant despite our quick-turn news cycle: “This crisis is still with us in different forms.” It is a retrospective collection comprised of newly orchestrated tracks taken from his back catalogue. Five years after it premiered in 2016, this reflective piece now forms the heart and soul of Richter’s new album, Exiles, recorded in Tallinn, Estonia, in 2019, and set to be released on 6 August. Richter’s response was instinctive: a 33-minute work titled Exiles, composed for Sol León and Paul Lightfoot’s Singulière Odyssée at the Nederlands Dans Theater, inspired by what Richter calls “the big question at that time”. The German chancellor Angela Merkel uttered the words Wir schaffen das (we can do this ), but as the number of refugees applying for asylum rose, attacks on their homes did, too. From his (then) home town of Berlin, the crisis was impossible to ignore.

In April of that year, an overcrowded vessel sank off the coast of Libya, en route to Italy, killing at least 800 trapped migrants – including children aged between 10 and 12. W hen Max Richter sat down to compose a new ballet score in 2015 he knew what he wanted to say.

Max richter vivaldi recomposed