52 TRANSCRIPTIONS & PARAPHRASES BIO GB ‘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’.
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