Jean FRANÇAIX (1912-1997)
Piano Music
CD 1 [59:23]
Scherzo (1932) [2.16]
Cinq portraits de jeunes filles (1936) [12.56]
Eloge de la danse (1947) [11.22]
Sonate pour piano (1960) [9.29]
Cinq “Bis” (1955) [9.35]
Danse des trios arlequins (1959) [1.57]
Huit Variations (1982) [7.30]
Nocturne (1994) [4.23]
CD 2 [64:45]
Huit danses exotiques (1957) [10.36] *
15 portraits d’enfants d’Auguste Renoir (1972) [14.19] +
Trois esquisses sur les touches blanches (1983) [4.37]
La Promenade d’un musicologue eclectique (1987) [18.43]
“De la musique avant tout chose” (1975) [8.46]
Pour Jacqueline (1922) [7.27]
CD 3 [66:54]
Si Versailles m’était conté (1953) [15.43]
Napoleon (1954) [26.39] +
Scuola di Ballo (1933, arr 1966) [24.26] *
Martin Jones with *Richard McMahon, +Adrian Farmer (pianos)
rec. Wyastone Leys, Monmouth, 14-15 February+, 22 June*, 31 October, 1, 14-15
November 2011
NIMBUS NI 5880 [3 CDs: 59:23 + 64:48 + 66:54]
It was always the heartfelt wish of Jean Françaix that his music should give
enjoyment and pleasure to his listeners, and in this 3 CD collection of his
music for piano he does just that. From the early For Jacqueline
published at the age of ten to the Nocturne written when the composer
was a sprightly 82, the good humour is ever-present virtually untroubled by
any sense of melancholy. One could describe this music as “neo-classicism
without tears”. Although sometimes the harmonies are jazzily spiced, there
is never any of the sense of experimentation with multi-tonality than can
at times make the music of Les Six so unsettling.
To subject every piece on this comprehensive collection to a detailed analysis
or criticism would be to break a butterfly on a wheel. It is best to highlight
some pieces which bring particular pleasure. The Fifteen Portraits
of children by Auguste Renoir, designed like many of the pieces here
as teaching vehicles, open with a beautiful berçeuse which has all the charm
of Fauré’s Dolly Suite but which at under a minute in duration is
all too brief. The Three studies on the white notes (also designed
as exercises for children) create evocative music from their very limitations,
with a beautifully pensive second movement entitled La rêveur pendant
la leçon de piano. The pastiches which constitute La promenade d’un
musicologue eclectique bring some delightfully tongue-in-cheek touches:
Handel’s grand opening gestures lead to a quicker passage which sounds rather
like a version of Charlie is my darling, and Scarlatti gets gloriously
mixed up with Mendelssohn and Beethoven. Françaix extracted the Hommage
à Maurice Ravel from this suite and orchestrated it as Pavane pour
un Génie vivant, which Hyperion
have recorded in their collections of Françaix’s orchestral music (review;
review;
also CDA67384). The composer’s highly satirical view of contemporary music
in the next sketch is described in the booklet as “too poisonous to be really
amusing” but its encapsulation of avant-garde absurdities in a span
of just over two minutes is all too realistic and great fun as a result: a
passage where the piano is tapped is drily marked maestoso, and the
piece begins in silence with a “brief meditation, right hand on the keys,
left hand in Glenn Gould position.” The resolutely twelve-tone Humphrey Searle
got away with this sort of thing in his Hoffnung concert parodies such as
Punkt Kontrapunkt; why should Françaix be denied his chance to join
in the fun? The final section pokes sly fun at Adam’s O holy night.
The incredibly precocious suite For Jacqueline brings the survey
of the music originally written for piano on the first two discs to an end.
One notes that the composer’s style really changed very little over the following
seventy years although perhaps his very mild flirtation with harmonic astringency
abated slightly over time. Certainly the Rock’n’Roll finale to the
Eight exotic dances has very little sense of rock music about it,
with much more kinship to Milhaud’s Scaramouche for the same two-piano
medium.
The most substantial work on these three discs is the 1960 Piano Sonata,
which although it is less than ten minutes in duration is clearly meant to
be taken seriously. The second movement Elegy is nicely judged but
the quicker movements are all perhaps a little heavy-handed for their essentially
light-hearted material. The work was dedicated to Idil Biret who recorded
it at the time of the première when she was nineteen, and whose recording
has been reissued on Naxos as part of a miscellaneous recital. Jones obviously
brings greater maturity and warmth to the score, and his recorded sound is
superior.
The final disc contains music from three of Françaix’s film scores in piano
arrangements, and these three suites are the longest pieces in the collection.
Jones plays, as one would expect, with absolute precision and assurance and
his partners in the works for two pianos or piano (four hands) match him stylishly.
The industry and indefatigability of this artist deserve our utmost gratitude.
Over the years he has given us complete editions of the piano music of many
composers whose works in this field would otherwise have remained totally
unknown, and the results have always been superb. Françaix was an extraordinarily
prolific composer, but even so he has never received a CD recording of more
than selections from his piano music. Now we have three at once, and curiosity
is most definitely satisfied.
After a while one gets the same sort of feeling that one does in the company
of a friend or acquaintance whose company is absolutely charming for a short
period of time, but the relentless inconsequentiality of whose conversation
starts to grate after a period. In the end one can only feel the overwhelming
desire to urge this terminally cheerful character to either give it a rest
for a bit, or to buzz off and leave one in peace. Even the music for the film
Napoleon is remorselessly light-hearted - at one moment [track 5,
2’50”] one surely hears a pre-echo of Blackadder! - as is the film
score for the documentary Si Versailles m’était conté with its pastiches
of La Marseillaise and various dance rhythms. Unless the listener
has a pathologically sweet tooth, half an hour of Françaix is as much as anyone
should seek to consume at any one time. To do him justice, one suspects that
the composer never imagined that anyone would want to digest more than that
at any one helping. However here we have a collection which will furnish hours
of harmless delight – if sampled in a piecemeal fashion.
The only competition in this repertoire comes from a single CD selection played
by Nicola Narboni,
whose playing is suitably light-hearted but suffers from an unsuitably dry
acoustic which almost entirely eliminates any sense of resonance from her
instrument. She plays several of the suites but excludes any of the music
for more than one player, and for some reason splits the five Encores
throughout the length of her CD.
The booklet notes here are comprehensive, informative - although the track
listing for some reason identifies the 1983 Trois esquisses as “posth”
- and extremely well written but self-effacingly anonymous*! They follow Françaix
through his career as a composer for piano chronologically, but the first
two CDs mix the works originally written for piano from different periods
to create as much contrast as possible. Foreign purchasers should be warned
that the notes come exclusively in English, and there is no translation even
into French.
In short this set makes a worthy complement to the discs of orchestral music
to which Hyperion have been treating us over the years, but the limited nature
of Françaix’s muse is rather too well conveyed by the set cover illustration
of a clown balancing on a monocycle.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
* We have been informed that the notes were written by Paul
Conway
Françaix’s music gives enjoyment and pleasure and this collection does just
that.