Tales of the Jazz Age

Pianist Florian Noack's new album opens the gates to the past to rediscover the passion of the Roaring Twenties, when 20th-century music wavered between party and war. In the 1920s, Berlin and Paris were flooded with jazz, Dada, and cabaret, fueled by liberating music from America. Between the two World Wars, the arts experienced a true heyday as they tried to forget the first and suppress their fears of the inevitable second. This is Florian Noack's daring journey through time, a musical odyssey through his own transcriptions of Fats Waller, Gershwin, and Kurt Weill, voluminous and sophisticated arrangements that alternate with original masterpieces by Francis Poulenc, Erwin Schulhoff, and Clément Doucet. An album full of charm and virtuosic acrobatics, which finds the poetry of those years of upheaval in the joy and radiance of its music.