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] *
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
