Perfect Trouble, CD Moers Music 1989    

Maggie Nicols - Stimme 
Sibylle Pomorin - Tenorsaxophon, Komposition
Tom Cora - Cello
 Klaus Wilmanns - Kontrabass
 Chris Cutler - Schlagzeug

What is this???

CD ITM Records, 1992

Terry Jenoure - Stimme, Geige
Sibylle Pomorin - Flöte, Altsaxophon
Herb Robertson - Trompete, Flügelhorn
Annie Whitehead - Posaune
Christy Doran - Gitarre 
Kim Clarke - E-Bass
Kamal Sabir - Schlagzeug, Perkussion

UA 1991, Berlin, Jazzfest

Auguries of Speed

CD ITM Records, 1992

Terry Jenoure - Stimme, Geige
Sibylle Pomorin - Flöte, Altsaxophon
Herb Robertson - Trompete, Flügelhorn
Annie Whitehead - Posaune
Christy Doran - Gitarre
Kim Clarke - E-Bass
Kamal Sabir - Schlagzeug, Perkussion

UA 1991, Berlin, Jazzfest

To Hummingbird - Jazz/Song

Song

Early Winter

Memory of summer is winter’s consciousness.
Sitting or walking or merely standing still,
Earning a living or watching the snow fall,
I am remembering the sun on the sidewalks in a warmer place,
A small hotel and a dead girl’s face;
I think of these in this higher altitude, staring West.

But the room is cold, the words in the books are cold;
And the question of whether we get what we ask for 
Is absurd, unanswered by the sound of an unlatched door                          
Rattling  in wind, or the sound of snow on roofs, or glare 
Of the winter sun. What we have learned is not what we were                                      
told.
I watch the snow, feel for the heartbeat that is not there.

January

Morning: blue, cold and still.
Yes that have stared too long
Stare at the wedge of light
At the end of the frozen room
Where snow on a windowsill,
Packed and cold as a life,
Winters the sense of wrong
And emptiness and loss
That is my awakening.
A lifetime drains away
Down a path of frost;
My face in the looking-glass
Turns again from the light
Towad fragments of the past
That break with the end of sleep,
This wakening, this breath
No longer real, this deep
Darkness where we toss,
Cover a life at the last.
Sleep is too short a death.


That Winter

Cold ground and colder stone
Unearthed in ruined passageways,
The parodies of buildings in the snow-
Snow tossed and raging through a world
It imitates, that drives forever north
To what is rumored to be Spring.

To see the faces you had thought were put away
Forever, swept like leaves among the crowd,
Is to be drawn like them, on winter afternoons,
To avenues you saw demolished years before.
The houses still remain like monuments,
Their windows cracked, For Sale signs on the lawns.

Then grass upon those lawns again! - and dogs
In fashion twenty years ago, the streets mysterious
Through summer shade, the marvelous worlds
Within the world, each opening like a hand
And promising a constant course.- You see yourself,
A fool with smiles, one you thought dead.
And snow is raging, raging in a darker world.




 

Winter Songs

www.noahmax.net
Sheet music: https://ump.co.uk/composer/noah-max/

Rapture, Part I
iii. Name

World premiere performance
Susanna MacRae, Soprano/The Poet
Raymond Brien, Clarinet/The Lover
Pavel Timofeyevsky, Piano
Cover artwork painted by the composer

Text by Carol Ann Duffy

When did your name
change from a proper noun
to a charm?

Its three vowels
like jewels
on the thread of my breath.

Its consonants
brushing my mouth
like a kiss.

I love your name.
I say it again and again
in this summer rain.

I see it,
discreet in the alphabet,
like a wish.

I pray it
into the night
till its letters are light.

I hear your name
rhyming, rhyming,
rhyming with everything.

Rapture, Op.47 | Part I, iii. Name | Noah Max, 2022-3 (World Premiere)

Composer Contemporary Music

Sibylle Pomorin (*1956) studied from 1975 until 1980 flute and saxophone at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Münster, Germany. 

In 1984/85, she studied composition under Ernst Bechert in Hamburg, Germany and in 1994, she received composition lessons and an introduction to electroacoustic music from the American composer and electronic musician Alice Shields during a six-month stay in New York. 

Between 1982 and 1994 she toured with improvising musicians of the international scene and toured with her own groups and compositions through Europe and Israel. 

She received composition commissions for ensembles, festivals, broadcasting, and theatre as well as numerous prices and awards and was promoted by various working scholarships – inter alia in New York, Istanbul and Iceland. Scores publications and CD releases inter alia by Moers Music and in the Furore Verlag. 

Her music has been performed at international festivals for contemporary music in Europe, Israel, Mexico, Australia, Canada, Georgia, Japan and the USA.

www.noahmax.net
‘All focused intensity and chaotic curls, long pauses and fast-talking, the composer, conductor, artist and poet is a fizzing creative fuse’  The Sunday Times

British-Austrian composer Noah Max’s output spans opera, orchestral and chamber music. In 2021 his string trio Sojourn won The Clements Prize and was performed by members of the Piatti Quartet at Conway Hall. His music has been performed at the Royal Festival Hall, Wigmore Hall and the Royal Albert Hall’s Elgar Room in London, as well as Vienna’s Musikverein, Altalena Festival in Budapest, Uilenburgersjoel Synagogue in Amsterdam and the Paderewski Academy in Poland. 

Max recently spent five years bringing his debut opera A Child In Striped Pyjamas to the stage, culminating in a sold-out premiere production at London’s Cockpit Theatre in January 2023. The opera was lauded by critics as 'emotionally ambitious and vocally eloquent' (The Telegraph) and 'marvellously scored… a remarkable achievement for a young composer' (The Arts Desk). Max was interviewed about the opera by The Sunday Times and BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, with excerpts from the piece also broadcast on RTÉ Radio. Further revivals of the production are planned for 2023/24 and beyond.

Max’s debut album Songs of Loneliness was released on Toccata Classics in 2022; this year he returns to the recording studio with the Tippett Quartet and Sir Michael Morpurgo. He is Composer-in-Residence at Thaxted Festival, where his Quartet No.2 was premiered by the Tippett Quartet in July 2023; the festival has since commissioned Symphony No.1 to be premiered by the London Mozart Players on 21 June 2024. Other upcoming projects include the world premiere of the cello concerto AXIOM on 26 June 2024 as part of Proms at St. Jude’s, performed by Echo Ensemble and conducted by Max. Echo Ensemble also gives a performance of Max’s Phantasy Quintet at Thaxted Festival on 30 June 2024.

With a creative life that embraces music and painting, poetry and cinema, Max enjoys illuminating the relationships between different mediums. As a conductor he has assisted Jonathan Cohen and Arcangelo at the BBC Proms and conducted Endymion Ensemble at Wigmore Hall. Max’s artworks have displayed at the National Portrait Gallery. His columns have been printed in The Irish Times, The Strad and The Jewish Chronicle; he has contributed to BBC Music Magazine and has been interviewed for Classical Music, Opera Today and BBC Radio 3’s In Tune.

'Emotionally ambitious and vocally eloquent' The Telegraph

★ ★ ★ ★ ‘Sonorities with much spiky interlacing, coalescing intermittently into more humane consonances’ London Evening Standard

★ ★ ★ ★ ‘A high degree of textural inventiveness… marvellously scored… Max is in the early stages of a notable career’ The Arts Desk

New tracks tagged #Contemporary Song