LDV74

FLORIAN NOACK 21 FlorianNoack discovered Prokofievwhen hewas a teenager. The final of theQueen Elisabeth of Belgium International Music Competition was shown on television. The twenty-four-year-old Severin von Eckardstein, who went on to win the First Prize, captivated himwith his extravagantly personal interpretation of the Second Piano Concerto. Noack – then a dishevelled, hypersensitive teenager who read Camus’s L’Étranger with fist raised against convention – bought himself Eckardstein’s recording. He listened to it so often that he wrecked his CD player. The harsh radicalism of this music and the liberty of its performer – his Lamartinean profile – fertilised the youthful imagination, which did not need much encouragement. From the age of seventeen to eighteen, he hammered his keyboardwith greater intensity than ever, distilling in Prokofiev’s percussiveness the ardours of his brooding adolescence.