Me & You: ‘It’s a mystery where Noah’s imagination comes from’

Noah Max, 23, is a prolific composer, conductor and creative director of the Echo Ensemble. His latest work is an opera, A Child in Striped Pyjamas, based on John Boyne’s controversial children’s book The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.

It will premiere in January.

His father, Robert Max, is the cellist of the Barbican Piano Trio and teaches at the Junior Department of the Royal Academy of Music.

He is conductor of the North London Symphony Orchestra and the Oxford Symphony Orchestra and is the artistic director of Frinton Festival.
They both live in north-west London.

Noah on Robert:

Dad had this real warmth in the way he immersed us in music from the earliest age. My strongest memory is that he would often drive us to school and we would always listen to a CD.

Some weeks, we would listen to Leonard Bernstein, others Shostakovich… He always had these zany facts, these unusual fragments of history as a way into the pieces.

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Noah and Robert

Of his three children, I’m the only one who has ended up doing music full-time and I was the one who chose to play the cello, like my dad. My grandmother, [renowned cello teacher] Wendy Max, taught me.

As I became more advanced, I moved on to study with William Bruce, but Dad was always there from a musical perspective, encouraging the discipline, encouraging the practice. This was the same with spiritual matters. He’s become increasingly invested in Judaism as his life has gone on. I think he finds a real richness in the seasonal rhythm of it and he shares that love, that curiosity with his family.

I pursued the cello throughout my childhood and teenage years. It was a gateway to meeting some of the most wonderful people I have ever met. We made chamber music together, which is one of Dad’s big passions.

He’s an extraordinary chamber-music coach and has a profound knowledge of the depth and breadth of that repertoire. I also had my earliest conducting lessons with him and when I’m conducting something new, I still take the score to him and we talk through it.

Composing is the centre of my constellation of interests.

As a string player, I have a fair idea of how string instruments work, but Dad has a much better one! I’ll often send him pieces I’ve composed that are on their way to completion and he gives me advice like, “You need to be careful with the wind phrasing here.”

Or, “Careful with the string bowing there.” We see the creative process very differently. When you are creating something from scratch, it’s all in the sky. You have to pull it down and get it on paper. Then you think about what’s practical. Dad’s incredibly helpful with the practical side.

We share a deep love of music and all things cultural. We love the discussion, the “living culture” element. We both teach, sharing our passion for music with people of a certain age before they get to a point at school where playing a musical instrument puts you on the fringes of things, or so it’s perceived.

Actually, playing an instrument gives you a window into this amazing world of creativity.

Many of my colleagues have worked with Dad and they have enormous respect for his integrity, knowledge and sincerity. These are words I hear used about him on a regular basis. To grow up with that was really something.

Robert on Noah:

Noah is our second child and was quite noisy and difficult to keep tabs on.
My wife [pianist Zoe Solomon] and I are musicians.

We met at the Royal Academy of Music when we were undergraduates. Music is a part of our lives and we wanted it to be a part of our children’s lives.

I used to take Noah to his cello lessons on a Sunday morning and when he was very little I sat in on the lessons just as parents do and that was wonderful teacher-training for me.

Noah always found music very interesting. When he was about 11, we went to a Proms concert at the Royal Albert Hall and we were listening to Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben.

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The musical father and son