My Evening with Yann Tiersen

To be honest, I’m a bit of a racist when it comes to French things. I blame it on my experiences in France and my French classes in high school. A big exception (next to my friend Reyep :p) to this is the French composer Yann Tiersen. He’s far from a mainstream artist but somehow music fanatics that enjoy listening out of the box tend to know him because of his unique music.

He’s mostly known for the music he composed for the Amelie soundtrack, which is a true piece of art if you ask me. I like his choice of instruments and also how it’s rather minimalistic but with very intriguing melodies at the same time. Here’s a song from YouTube, the video is also from the Amelie movie:

So, when he came to my country I decided to buy tickets to see him live. I had heard that his previous concert in the Netherlands had been in a rock style, post-rock to be more specific so while I was hoping we’d get to hear his semi-classical songs, I was a little prepared for his other side… Unfortunately not everyone was.

On December 16 we went to Tivoli Oudegracht in Utrecht to see him live there. The concert was sold out and there were people at the venue’s door asking if we had any left-over tickets. Which we didn’t, of course.

The concert finally started with a horrible opening act, Christine Ott, whose music was pretty much… a huge amount of noise lacking anything vaguely resembling a melody. While she and her cellist played, the audience was talking continuously, obviously not impressed.

Then, it was finally time for Yann Tiersen’s show. Soon, it became clear that we wouldn’t be treated to a show in Amelie-style (or Le Phare, Les Retrouvailles, Good Bye Lenin! Soundtrack or C’était ici style) but we were in for a rock show. A post rock show even, because some tracks were rather monotone save for some very subtle rhythm and melody changes. Unfortunately, the sound of Tivoli Oudegracht wasn’t adjusted very well so this got lost in a sea of sound. The one thing which could be heard very clearly during the songs was the Ondes Martenot, an instrument that sounds like it’s screaming its guts out and resonated badly and it got on my nerves very quickly, unfortunately. Most of the songs were instrumental but when Yann or any of the band members would sing, their voices got lost in the music and you couldn’t even hear which language the song was in.

I heard that quite a lot of people left after a few songs because they came for his Amelie-sound only… I don’t blame them for having the wrong expectations, as far as I know he never released anything in his post-rock style on CD, so they were simply expecting to hear the same as the CDs they bought.

Anyway, despite the problems with the sound and the expected unexpected type of show, I enjoyed listening to most of the songs and I danced some on the heavier ones. A highlight of the evening was definitely the song Sur le fil, which is a solo piece for violin. Yann Tiersen really has some awesome violin skills, somehow I had always assumed that that it was a piece played by two violins instead of one! Here’s a video of it:

In the end, the concert was pretty great. I had been hoping for his Amelie style as well and whereas this was certainly not a bad concert, I think I rather be sure he’s going to do his usual style before going to one of his concerts again.