Noah Max’s four String Quartets are released on 7 March in a new album on Toccata Classics. Alongside the Tippett Quartet, Sir Michael Morpurgo also features as narrator in Max’s String Quartet No.1, Op.25 (2020) The Man Who Planted Trees. The album spans an enormous gamut of intense emotions, expressive gestures, textures and timbres, and musical ideas, qualities that run through the composer’s already substantial catalogue.

“Each one of these quartets is different from the others,” notes Noah Max. ​“Some require a lyrical mode of expression, and some are much more abrasive and rhythmically complex. Although only a few years stand between the moment I began work on the First Quartet and ruling the double bar at the end of the Fourth, their soundworlds are completely different.”

Extramusical connections, present in many of Max’s compositions, surface in several works on his latest recording. String Quartet No.1, Op.25 (2020) includes spoken quotes drawn from Jean Giono’s The Man Who Planted Trees, an allegorical tale about one man’s selfless devotion to the restoration of a desolate French valley and the healing effects it has on the natural world and on the story’s narrator. String Quartet No.2, Op 37 (2021 – 22), draws its inspiration from visual art, specifically the paintings of Juan Miró and the sculptures of Barbara Hepworth. String Quartet No.4, Op.45 (2022 – 23), meanwhile, lies rooted in John Boyne’s fable The Boy in Striped Pyjamas, wherein the author confronts the barbarity of Auschwitz-Birkenau through the story of two boys united in friendship and in death together in one of the concentration camp’s gas chambers. Max integrated material from his critically acclaimed Holocaust opera A Child in Striped Pyjamas, based on Boyne’s book, into the most recent of his quartets.

Read the full press release here.

The full album is available to download or order from Toccata Classics.

String Quartets No. 1, No. 2, No. 3 and No. 4 are published by United Music Publishing.