Jean Wiéner Redivivus

More than half a century ago I published, while still a student, an essay about the music of Jean Wiéner. When, ten years later, some of my adolescent journalism was collected into book form I omitted the Wiéner piece, partly because by then it seemed to me rather ‘young mannish’, partly because by then the composer appeared to have become a casualty of oblivion's poppy. So it was surprising, early this year, to light upon a new French double album recording of Wiéner's piano works. Listened to, the music turned out to retain the oddity and charm I'd recognized in it as a young man. It seems that although Wiéner virtually relinquished ‘serious’ composition around 1930, he did not in fact retire, but rather diverted his energies into popular music and film scores: fields for which his natural talents, as hinted in my original article, admirably fitted him. Moreover, he occasionally emerged from those more commercial worlds to compose another ‘art’ work, always of retrospective and usually of elegiac caste. These discs embrace two of the 1920s pieces I'd written about so many years ago; two sizeable sonata-style works written in the 1970s; and two small samplings of his film and pop music, pianistically arranged by the talented young player Omar Yagoubi, who seems to have been the instigator of the project. He plays the music with appropriate verve, though without scrupulous attention to the composer's notations. One might argue that that is acceptable because Wiéner is so quixotic a temperament; on the other hand one might also say that his notations wouldn't have been so meticulous had he not intended them to be respected.