Glastonbury 2023: naked protestor interrupts Tilda Swinton and Max Richter
Max Richter was joined on The Park Stage by actor Tilda Swinton at Glastonbury Festival, with the performance interrupted by a naked protestor.
The German-British composer took to the stage not long after 11am, with him and his group performing an orchestral rendition of his 2004 “protest” album, The Blue Notebooks. For the event, Richter was also joined by Tilda Swinton, who accompanied the music with various readings, including from works by poet Czeslaw Milosz, the winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature.
“Alright, good morning,” Richter told the crowd. “It’s amazing that so many of you have got out of bed this morning. It’s an honour to be opening up this stage today.”
Before inviting the rest of his band and Swinton on stage, Richter discussed how The Blue Notebooks was a reaction to the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the war that followed. Per the Evening Standard, he said: “It’s in response to what was happening in politics around the build-up to the Iraq war where politics was turning into a branch of fantasy literature and I was really struck with doubt about what was happening.”
Discussing the influence of the album – the title of which is a reference to The Blue Octavo Notebooks, a collection of the author Franz Kafka’s diaries published in 1953 – he continued: “And I thought about Kafka, who’s the patron saint of doubt, and I thought about making a piece which expressed everything, and so we recorded this piece in 2003.”
At one point during the performance, a naked man attempted to interrupt it in protest by approaching a microphone being used to record the audience. He was then escorted away by security. This was not the first time an actor had graced The Park Stage at this year’s Glastonbury Festival either, with Cate Blanchett joining Sparks onstage on Friday.
Listen to The Blue Notebooks below.
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