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Imagine you’re a famous pianist performing a concerto in a sold-out hall. You know the piece by heart because you’ve played it dozens of times without a score.

Suddenly, midway through the second movement, it happens: the dreaded memory lapse. What to do?

Joyce Yang is well prepared for such a snag. The 37-year-old soloist, who performs Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto as part of The Florida Orchestra’s Hough Family Foundation Masterworks program Nov. 22 & 23, always has a backup plan for that “blank’’ moment.

“Yes, this is a constant concern, but I think as long as you know you can recover, the fear of a memory lapse doesn’t overwhelm you,’’ she says. “I’ve studied and prepared for plan B and plan C − and sometimes plan D − for many of the difficult passages so I can get back on track in a split second if something goes wrong.’’

Not much goes wrong for Yang, one of the most sought-after young pianists in the world. Florida Orchestra listeners remember her riveting take on the Rachmaninoff Second and Third Piano Concertos in six back-to-back marathon performances in February 2023.

For any of the 10 concertos she currently has memorized, she focuses on small sections over and over: for every 10 minutes of a score, she invests more than 100 hours of practice. Then, a week before the concert, she runs through the entire piece to “make sure I have enough stamina to get through it more than once.’’

These practice sessions can be daunting. The average piano concerto runs between 30 to 45 minutes, and some contain about 30,000 individual notes. All need to be played in a strict order, with rhythmic and dynamic variations, to form a logical but impassioned narrative. It must be done in coordination with an orchestra, from memory, and in front of a paying audience.

If a snag should happen, Yang says she would quickly sew it up and move on.

“When you do have a memory lapse, hopefully the recovery is so quick that it doesn’t hurt the music or the ears of the listeners,’’ she says. “One thing I do is to always sing in my mind what I’m playing on the piano, so I never lose the pillar or important line of what I’m playing.

A high level of discipline has been part of Yang’s life since childhood. She took her first piano lessons at age 4 in her hometown of Seoul, South Korea. At 10, she entered the Korea National University of the Arts, and in 1997 moved to the United States to attend the Juilliard School of Music, where she won the Arthur Rubinstein Prize.

In 2005, she claimed the silver medal in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition and was a subject in a documentary about that contest, In the Heart of Music. The following year she made her New York Philharmonic debut before joining the orchestra on its celebrated tour of Asia.

Yang’s current tour is a whirlwind, with concertos by Prokofiev, Barber, Leshnoff, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Gershwin and Rachmaninoff − often just days apart and on different continents. She also puts herself through a routine of mental exercises that help engrave the music in her mind, which is “important because traveling and jet lag can chip away at my concentration.’’

The Grieg is especially challenging because of its enduring popularity, which means she must make it sound fresh for every performance and not a rubber stamp of last night’s experience.

“There’s a lot of nuanced timing and colors you can create,’’ she says. “For me, it needs the right balance between something very natural and organic, with something very expressive and free. If you play it just simply, it falls flat. But if you take too much freedom, the music loses its innocence.

“So there needs to be a balance between the head and the heart. Only then do I feel that I become the protagonist of this narrative, and the music pours out of me.’’

In addition to the Grieg, TFO will perform Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Ballade for Orchestra and Johannes Brahms’ Second Symphony. Aram Demirjian conducts.