Transcription, Florian Noack once said, “is a form of creativity and ingenuity that forces me to approach my instrument differently; searching for new textures, richness, colors or ways to combine my 10 fingers.”

The Belgian pianist’s March 20 Grand Piano Series program set for St. Leo Auditorium, Bonita Springs, will stretch those 10 fingers to their limits with a transcription of a transcription.

After opening with a Schubert masterpiece sonata, completed two months before the composer’s death, Noack will launch into his transcription of Bach’s own transcription of a Vivaldi concerto for four violins and orchestra.

Noack’s piano transcriptions of orchestral works by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Rimsky-Korsakov have attracted the attention of esteemed musicians like Boris Berezovsky and Dmitri Bashkirov, and earned a bouquet of awards including the International Classical Music Award.

But his eloquent performance of piano works both known and little known has proved equally inspired.

Imagine a world map turned upside down, he asks, where the terms “obscure” and “well-known” lose their significance. In much the same way, Noack discovered a whole new world of piano repertoire at a young age.

As a teen, he dove deep into the compositions of lesser-known composers Alkan, Medtner and Lyapunov, thanks to Guy Sacre’s influential book “La musique de piano,” which catalogs 4,000 such works.

He and Grand Piano Series are on the same wavelength here — equally committed to staging, as the Series puts it, “outstanding compositions that are rarely (if ever) performed, to broaden our audience’s appreciation and bring life to dormant compositions.”

“To have found something beautiful that is rare, or poorly known, you get the feeling of injustice,” said Noack. “Which gives you, as a pianist, a sort of mission; everybody should hear this.”

As Bachtrack.com put it, “To all music lovers who complain about always hearing the same works in recital, we should whisper very loudly: Florian Noack,” from whom we expect the unexpected amid the familiar.

“Building a concert program is like mental gymnastics, there are so many parameters to harmonize,” says Noack. “It is always about balance — of the specific characters of the works, their possible and attractive coherence. There is also a balance between the known and the unknown. I realize, being a listener too, that it is important at the concert to have moments when you ‘recognize’ the music.”

Promising to keep the audience on the edge of their seats with some of the most inventive programming since Liszt himself, he’ll not only present beloved works of Schubert and Bach but also interweave Liszt’s Olympian Transcendental Études with those of the lesser known but no less ambitious Sergei Lyapunov.

Liszt’s 12 études alone have been described as a physical endurance test.

Last year, Noack told an interviewer that Sergei Lyapunov’s continuing them 12-fold in a posthumous tribute to Liszt’s original project required the same achievement as Liszt’s: “a sort of alchemic process, an attempt to transform technical difficulty into pure poetry.”

Transforming virtuosity into poetry is Noack’s stock-in-trade. ¦

In the KNOW

GRAND PIANO SERIES: 

Florian Noack

· Wednesday, March 20, 3:00 p.m.

· St. Leo Auditorium, 28290 Beaumont Road, Bonita Springs.

· Purchase tickets in advance for $45 ($50 at the door) at grandpianoseries.org.

For assistance, call 469-333-3231.