The contemporary “easy listening” status of Eric Satie’s Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies belie his reputation in his own day as a musical iconoclast and innovator of the first order. And while they are among his earliest compositions, their outrageous simplicity and, in the Gnossiennes, lack of key signatures and bar lines, place them too in those dangerous regions of novelty and experimentation.
Prolific pianist Noriko Ogawa, whose Debussy interpretations in particular have won her wide acclaim, begin and end this first volume of the complete piano music of Satie with the above works. What happens in between should prove to those who consider Satie’s music chillax fodder that it is anything but.
Ogawa’s tone, tempi and phrasing are just right in the seven Gnossiennes and three Gymnopédies for the more transparent timbre and slightly faster decay of the 1890 Érard grand, she’s chosen to record on. The effect is a languid obsessiveness, a perfumed tension, between the (mainly) simple chordal accompaniments and spare, haunting, modal-inflected melodies.
Following the Gnossiennes is what feels like a Dadaist phantasmagoria, beginning with the ragtime march Le Piccadilly and heralding the Gymnopédies with Satie’s own arrangement of his cabaret song, Je te veux, a waltz, which is also among his most popular pieces today.
There is a set of portraits – Avant-dernières Penseés – of composers Debussy, Dukas and Roussel. There is the Croquis et Agaceries d’un Gros Bonhomme en Bois (Sketches and exasperations of a big wooden fellow). There is the Bureaucratic Sonatina, The Dried Embryos, the Age-old and Instantaneous Hours and the three Distinguished Waltzes of a Jaded Dandy.
The titles say it all, and Satie’s wit, cheek and bubbling inventiveness are almost meretriciously on display throughout, especially in the liberal borrowings from composers such as Mozart and Clementi and his prescient Minimalism. It’s a rich feast, that Ogawa partakes of with gusto, while always observing etiquette; Satie was a perfectionist, and behind the relentless experimentation is a striving for maximum effect through minimal means: the true meaning of virtuosity.
As a member of Les Six and intimate of Debussy and Ravel, Satie influenced many people while not winning as many friends as he ought to have, due to his volatile temper and marked eccentricity. But, largely through the efforts of contemporary composers such as John Cage, his place in the musical pantheon was assured. Advocates with the taste and talent of Ogawa will ensure it stays that way.
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