Jean Françaix lived to be 85, and the astonishing thing is that he never once lost his nerve. Other composers of his generation either grew severe with age — adopting serial procedures like a hair shirt — or retreated into nostalgia. Françaix did neither. He kept writing music that sparkled, that teased, that refused to take anything too seriously except craft.
Which made him, for decades, slightly unfashionable. The postwar avant-garde had no patience for wit.
He was a pupil of Nadia Boulanger, which tells you something — she recognized in him a natural that didn’t need fixing. He gave his first public piano recital at five. Ravel noticed him. That lineage shows in everything Françaix wrote: the clarity of texture, the mistrust of muddle, the instinct that music should communicate rather than confound. What he absorbed from Ravel and the French neoclassical tradition, he made entirely his own — lighter, more impish, less bittersweet. Poulenc had heartbreak underneath the chansons. Françaix, mostly, did not. That’s both his limitation and his charm.
This Wergo anniversary set, drawn from recordings made across three decades between 1967 and 1997, gives us the range and something of the depth. The span matters. Françaix in his fifties sounds different from Françaix in his eighties — not profoundly different, he was too consistent for that, but the late music has a slightly more autumnal quality, the wit shading occasionally toward wistfulness without ever quite arriving there.
The wind music is where Françaix is most completely himself. His writing for wind instruments is frankly miraculous — idiomatic without being obvious, technically demanding in ways that never sound showy, inventive in ways that make you wonder why no one else thought of it first. He understood the oboe the way Mozart understood the clarinet: as a voice capable of irony. The woodwind quintets and the various chamber combinations here confirm that this was his natural habitat, more than the orchestra, more even than the solo piano, where his own considerable gifts as a performer could sometimes tip the writing toward the demonstrative.
That piano playing, by the way. When Françaix performs his own work on these recordings — and he does, at least through the earlier sessions — there’s a particular quality of rhythmic nonchalance that’s actually quite difficult to fake. The tempos feel chosen rather than calculated. He makes rubato look like breathing.
The string writing is less consistently inspired. There are moments in the chamber works for strings where the invention turns mechanical, where the chromaticism feels applied rather than felt, where one senses the composer solving a problem rather than discovering a truth. This has been said before about Françaix and it bears repeating — he was not, at bottom, a string composer. The instruments that breathe, that phrase through air, brought out his best instincts. Strings, which phrase through friction, sometimes brought out his habits.
Still. Even a Françaix habit is more enjoyable than most composers’ inspiration.
The recordings themselves are variable in quality, which is inevitable given the thirty-year spread and different production circumstances. The earlier sessions have that slightly close, slightly dry German studio quality of the late 1960s — serviceable but not flattering to the upper registers of the winds. The later recordings open up considerably, and the engineering serves the music better. Wergo has done creditable work with the transfers.
What’s missing, if anything, is the larger Françaix — the orchestral pieces, the opera Le diable boiteux, the extraordinary L’Apocalypse selon saint Jean, which reveald that this seemingly lightweight composer could, when he chose, sustain a long dramatic arc with genuine power. Those pieces don’t appear here, and their absence leaves the portrait slightly incomplete. What we have is the chamber Françaix, which is a great deal, but not quite everything.
No matter. A composer who could write this much music of this quality, across this many decades, with this kind of consistency and joy, deserves the centenary celebration Wergo provides. The fashions shifted around him and he paid them no mind. That takes its own kind of courage — or perhaps a very deep confidence in pleasure as a legitimate artistic goal. Either way, the music survives.
