Festival Music

Yann Tiersen

The Hub, Edinburgh

Rob Adams

three stars

THE Breton sailors’ shirts were out in some force to welcome the arrival, by bicycle apparently, of Yann Tiersen, the composer of the soundtrack to Amelie who holds to Brittany being a distinct entity as opposed to a region of France.

On a low-lit stage with a backdrop of Edinburgh’s skyline in shadow Tiersen switched on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, confirming that the builder’s cleavage is an international phenomenon in the process, and sat down at the piano joined by the sounds of birdsong and spoken words. There’s an elegant languor to his music and an evocative quality that allows the audience to close their eyes and put their own images to it. Soon, however, some had noticeably closed their eyes and were, shall we say, conserving their energy.

Tiersen’s piano playing is more the kind that gets the composing done – and they’re lovely tunes, many of them studies in waltz time – rather than gripping with the touch and finesse of a concert pianist, and the pieces themselves could have stood a little more development. When he moved to violin he created textural effects with cross-bowing that, again, were redolent of film accompaniment but didn’t really add much to what we’d already heard, and his piece for what appeared to be two toy pianos was more filler than killer.

Having not said much more than “hi” and “thank you” before, he then prefaced his encore by making a point about being from Brittany, not France, that put some fire into his playing. If he’d done that at the start of the concert, this pleasant encounter might have been a more absorbing affair.