Max/ Brien/ Lockett - Songs of Loneliness

Noah Max - born into a musical family in London in 1998 - has already carved out an impressive career as a composer and conductor; he is also an accomplished painter and a poet. For someone so young, the surprise of this debut album is the sense of loss unifying these pieces. The feeling of innocence forgone is characteristic of the music of many English composers in the first half of the twentieth century, Elgar, Finzi, Howells and Vaughan Williams among them. Max's music is clearly of it's own time, but it shares the elegiac lyricism of those earlier masters.