By Steve Pond

German-born, U.K.-based Max Richter is one of the most successful composers in modern classical music, a gifted post-minimalist whose signature work, “On the Nature of Daylight” from his classic 2004 album “The Blue Notebooks,” has been heard in more than 20 films and TV shows since it was first recorded. It has most notably appeared in “Arrival,” “Shutter Island” (in a version intercut with Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth”) and the first season of “The Last of Us.”

But when Richter began to write music for Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet,” he had no idea that the climactic scene of that film — Jessie Buckley’s Agnes Shakespeare in the Globe Theatre watching the first performance of her husband’s “Hamlet,” with its ties to the death of their young son a few years earlier — would be set not to his new music but rather to his greatest hit.