Recording Review
Jean Françaix
Le roi nu; Les demoiselles de la nuit
Ulster Orchestra
Thierry Fischer conductor
Hyperion CDA 67489
Gramophone, May 2005
by Andrew Lamb
A disc that does Françaix’s music full justice – suck it and see…
Jean Françaix’s music divides opinion, and he’s certainly not the composer who comes to mind for emotional intensity or depth. But ballet music is a different thing, and he as much as anyone was surely suited for it.
He composed nine ballets in all, of which Thierry Fisher and the Ulster Orchestra have already given us Les Malheurs de Sophie in an earlier collection. Reviewing that (Gramophone, May 2004), Roger Nichols rather got Françaix out of his system, complaining that after about three minutes of pretty well any Françaix work his mind started drifting. Well, don't try so hard! Allow the music to wash over, and enjoy what Calum Macdonald’s insert-note rightly describes as the music’s ‘amiable unpretentiousness’, its attractive wisps of melody and spunky orchestration serving to keep the listener engaged.
Of the two works here, Le roi nu (‘The naked king’, 1936) was based by Serge Lifar on Hans Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes and was Françaix’s fourth ballet score. Les demoiselles de la nuit (‘The ladies of the night’, 1948), with a scenario by Jean Anouilh, was his fifth – a ‘cat ballet’ that was thus something of a precursor of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical. The former is the more upbeat, the latter altogether moodier, with moments of romance and tenderness.
Both are witty and humorous, displaying (to quote Macdonald again) Françaix’s ‘ability to say just what needs to be said, no more, no less, in just as many notes as it takes to say it’. The playing throughout is sensitive and fully attentive to the varied rhythms, while the sound is clear and bright, bringing out Françaix’s imaginative writing for individual instruments, especially the woodwind. The CD will not change opinions of Françaix; but it will surely suit those who already appreciate his style.
The Eye, March 26 – April 2, 2005
by Ivan Hewett
Jean Françaix is always described as witty, fun and as irresistibly French as a warm baguette and the Folies Bergères. But just as the baguette often turns out to be stale and the Folies Bergeres a bit tired, so for me Françaix’s charm lasts only a while, before those “wrong note” waltzes start to get tiresome.
If any CD could have changed my mind, it’s this one. It contains two ballets, one based on the story of the Emperor’s new clothes, the other on a tale of a cat that falls in love with a human. It’s the conductor Thierry Fischer’s third Françaix CD with the Ulster Orchestra, and the players now have the composer’s style off to a T. The sound is as light and fluffy, but the music seems as hollow as ever. At the end, when the cat’s lover dies, Françaix tries to strike a pathetic note by cribbing from Ravel – but fails to make it moving.
Latest review of the Ulster Orchestra’s new release on Hyperion of ballet music by Jean Françaix.
On Saturday morning, 02 April 2005, Andrew McGregor began BBC Radio 3’s CD Review by playing the closing section of Françaix’s ballet The Emperor’s New Clothes (during which the Ulster Orchestra players are heard to laugh!).
His back announcement was:
“Jean Françaix’s ballet The Emperor’s New Clothes, a new recording from the Ulster Orchestra, conducted by Thierry Fischer. It’s performed with spirit and humour. The recording is excellent and the coupling is another Françaix ballet, Les demoiselles de la nuit, about a decadent society of cats. The whole thing’s a delight and it’s on Hyperion. Out now.”
BBC Music Magazine, April 2005
by Terry Blain
Hyperion’s splendid championship of this underrated composer now reaches the third CD of his orchestral music. Françaix was only 23 when he wrote Le roi nu, a 26-minute ballet based on Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Emperor’s New Clothes. Unsurprisingly, the score fizzes with youthful high spirits – the frantic skittering of strings, brass and woodwind on the King’s initial entry is one example among many. More surprising, possibly, that it should be so sharply distinctive – yes, there are plenty of Stravinskyisms in the instrumentation (the première was 1936 in Paris), but the playful elegance and gay, insouciant approach to melody are inimitably Gallic in style.
Les demoiselles de la nuit, another ballet from 12 years later, is about cats, one of whom, lovelorn, becomes a human. The colourings are more nocturnal, the characterisation at times more precisely focused, though the overall impression isn’t quite so punchily convincing as in Le roi.
Conductor Thierry Fischer seems totally attuned to Françaix’s idiom, and the engineers have captured the excellent acoustics of Belfast’s Ulster Hall to colourful effect. The Ulster Orchestra plays with wit, point and vitality: it can rarely if ever have sounded better on record.