Can we go back a hundred years in time?

Pianist Florian Noack’s new album pushes back the gates of time to rediscover the lifeblood of the Roaring Twenties, which saw twentieth-century music trace a path between partying and war. During the 1920s, Berlin and Paris were awash with jazz, Dada and cabaret, rocked by the liberating music come from America. The arts truly roared between the two world wars, trying to forget the first and stifle their anxieties over the inevitable second.

This is the bold journey through time offered by Florian Noack, a musical odyssey through his own transcriptions of Fats Waller, Gershwin and Kurt Weill, voluble and refined arrangements that alternate with original gems by Francis Poulenc, Erwin Schulhoff and Clément Doucet.

An album filled with charm and virtuoso acrobatics that finds the poetry of those years of upheaval in the joy and radiance of their music.

‘To live in the whole world of music’. Florian Noack took Henry Cowell’s motto as his own when he was very young, without even thinking about it, in a natural impulse that still draws him away from the beaten track.

An adventurer, an explorer, a discoverer, he needs to embrace every aspect of music. His approach is singular: to forage beyond the boundaries of the mainstream piano repertory, not to limit himself to it, driven only by enthusiasm and wonder. His universe seems to be constantly expanding, even though it is wholly contained within his piano, which as a result is neither entirely something else nor entirely itself, taking on unheard-of textures. He wants to feel under his fingers all the pieces of music he falls in love with, so as to prolong the emotion they engender, dozens, hundreds of times. His piano gladly lends itself to the exercise, whether he is playing the piece in its original form or presenting a transcription of a lush orchestral work, a boogie-woogie for jazz band or a sixteenth-century chanson. It took a certain insolence to transcribe Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet at the age of sixteen! Ever since then, the intrepid musician has been hooked on the act of transcription, appropriating Bach, Rimsky-Korsakov and so many others with an unfailingly fresh take on the music.

Florian Noack charts his course as if he were building a musical Tower of Babel. His discs Album d’un voyageur and Transcriptions bring together a multitude of idioms, in good neighbourly relations: ‘to place works side by side, however distant they may be, is to try to make them cohabit harmoniously until they fit together, as if one were revealed through the other, each saying what the other is not’.

Guy Sacre and these words of his lie at the origin of Florian’s journey. Sacre’s book La Musique de piano became an inexhaustible source of discoveries for the young artist, who plucked from its pages names both famous and less well-known. He sightread and was enthralled by the beauty of a piece by a neglected composer, then listened to and performed Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, equally gripped by the power of their masterpieces.

Literature, like music an art of time, accompanied him, inspired him, forged him. As did the training he received from his mentors: the intuitive, mystical teaching of Vassily Lobanov, who in addition to his advice on what to read, urged him to ‘develop your soul’, while with Claudio Martínez Mehner he acquired refinement of touch and honing of detail. Meeting Ferenc Rados transformed his relationship with music. Now he could no longer remain content with a kind of stylistic uniformity, but learnt to understand what the notes want, how they act and interact, how to utter them. From then on, each work became unique, a world in itself, whose individuality he wished to experience and savour. He knew that every one of them, whether by Lyapunov, Clementi or Mozart, can make its impact, as long as it one does it justice.

Mozart. It was to the sound of his music that Florian Noack was born in Brussels in 1990, and it was at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel that his career began. After winning international prizes and being invited to play on every continent, he returned to his home base of Belgium, at the Conservatoire Royal de Liège, where he now teaches. A genuine mission for him, like setting down rare, sometimes unrecorded works for La Dolce Volta and thereby enabling them to exist. And with each disc, he reaps his reward: he has added an object to the world.