Yann Tiersen
![Yann Tiersen played the Sydney Opera House on January 24 as part of the Sydney Festival 2017.](/web/20170125054150im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/r/a/m/d/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gtydsp.png/1485319905982.jpg)
Sydney Opera House, January 24
★★★★
The Opera House fell into a music box on Tuesday night.
One by one, the red-cushioned seats were washed away (their passengers along with them) and funnelled into a neat wooden box.
The music maker? French composer and multi-instrumentalist Yann Tiersen, who, by the dim light of a few lanterns, wound a transportive tune across piano, violin, melodica and toy piano.
Best known for his soundtracks for the films Amelie (2001) and Goodbye Lenin! (2003), Tiersen's is an unmistakably French sound – heavy on the melancholy.
With no more than a murmured "Good Evening," a softly-spoken Tiersen opened the 90-minute performance with pieces from his more recent album, Eusa, released last year.
The album is a tribute to the Breton coast where he grew up, and is built on sound scape and field recordings.
And so it was from a vintage reel-to-reel tape player on stage that waves washed over the concert hall, peppered with the call of seagulls and whirring coastal winds.
All this lay underneath Tiersen's metrical piano riffs, which hark to the delicate sounds of Chopin and Erik Satie.
Hearing Tiersen in chorus with the sounds of nature, made it clear why the French musician has had so much success composing for film scores.
But while his works are capable of evoking huge emotion and storytelling, they are not complex in their composition, much like the tunes of an antique music box.
This was no more true than of the short fragments Tiersen played from the toy piano on the stage floor, which left the Concert Hall ringing with the sound of a bygone era.
As he moved from toy piano, to melodica – in La Dispute, of Amelie fame – and on to the violin, Tiersen seemed to be stitching together short fragments of a larger work.
It meant it felt slightly jarring when the audience clapped between every short take, rather than allowing the silence to hang, as one would between the movements of a concerto.
But nothing was likely to hush the adoring crowd which turned out in droves to see the French composer.
And treated to two encores, they were only too happy to be taken in Tiersen's music box, if just for the evening.
Yann Tiersen plays Hamer Hall in Southbank, Melbourne, on January 25.