Tiersen: Pour Amélie, Piano Music

The maestro of Minimalist piano music has done it again, with an album of gentle melodies and soothing sounds from Yann Tiersen (b.1970) a composer best known outside his native France for the soundtrack to the movie Amélie (2001): the soundtrack sold over 200,000 copies in his homeland, and became Platinum in the US and Germany.

Tiersen’s music helped to make the movie a hit, capturing its bittersweet mix of humour and sadness, and many of the best-known pieces from the soundtrack are included on this new album, such as the Satie-tinged ‘Waltz of Amélie’, but there is much more recent music here which Tiersen wrote in the wake of the film’s success, including extracts from his soundtracks to Goodbye Lenin (2003) and Tabarly (2008), which tells the tragic story of the French sailor Eric Tabarly, who won the Single-Handed Transatlantic Yacht Race twice before drowning in the Irish Sea.

Tiersen’s music is often melancholy and reflective, but there are many lighter and more uptempo numbers on this wide-ranging survey of his output, which is sure to share the popular success of Jeroen van Veen’s many other albums for Brilliant Classics such as his Minimalist Piano Collections (8551 and 9171) and compendiums of Ludovico Einaudi (94910 and 9452), Simeon ten Holt (9434 and 9453) and Jacob ter Veldhuis (94873). ‘The music needs to speak for itself, and that it does, in this consistently enjoyable collection, I have no reservations in recommending to anyone who enjoys minimalism’ (Fanfare).

French composer Yann Tiersen (born 1970) is one of the most popular and successful film music writers of today. His soulful and melancholic music finds its traces in folk music, French chansons, musette waltzes, street music, but also in the minimalism of Satie, Glass and Nyman.
His international breakthrough came with the music for the French blockbuster “Amélie”. Later followed “Goodbey Lenin” and others.
Dutch pianist, pioneer and champion of Minimalism Jeroen van Veen recorded Tiersen’s most popular melodies, playing the piano in his inimitable way: focussed, serene and hypnotising.
A worthy successor of Van Veen’s successful recordings for Brilliant Classics of piano music by Glass, Pärt, Yiruma and many others.