Max: String Quartets

It is remarkable not only that the London-based Noah Max (b. 1998) should have composed four string quartets by his mid-twenties; their stylistic range is also surprisingly wide. No. 1, which sets Jean Giono’s story ‘The Man who Planted Trees’, narrated here by Sir Michael Morpurgo, has distant roots in English pastoralism, but the refracted lines, furtive colours and ecstatic textures of Nos. 2 and 3 are much closer to European modernism, with echoes of Kurtág and Ligeti. No. 4 is a wild ride, its manic, swirling rhythms interrupted by passages of whispered intimacy that eventually draw it into silence.