Satie - Orchestral Works (Toulouse Capitole Orchestra, 1988)

Couple of recent charity shop finds this week.  First up, here's a really enjoyable hour of the orchestral side of Erik Satie, which I could certainly do with exploring further.  Plasson and the Toulouse Capitole give this music all the subtlety, wit and charm it requires in a beautifully detailed recording from 1988.

A definite highlight of this collection is Satie's music for Parade, a surreal one-act ballet devised by Jean Cocteau, choreographed by Leonide Massine and with bizarre cubist costumes by Picasso.  Lasting only 15 minutes, the score includes the sounds of typewriters and foghorns - allegedly at Cocteau's insistence over Satie's distaste, but in hindsight sounding like an influence on Varèse, who was acquainted with Satie around this time.  Moving from surrealism to Dada, Francis Picabia's ballet Relâche ("Cancelled") sparkles with Satie's lush, expressive and witty score.

Elsewhere, Satie's sense of playfulness and influences from Fin De Siècle cabaret make the dance suite La Belle Excentrique an uproarious joy, and the Varèse-commissioned Cinq Grimaces occupies a similar space.  There's also opportunity on this album to just luxuriate in the sublime compositional genius of Satie in arrangements of works originally for piano (or written in both piano and orchestral forms).  Gymnnopodies No. 1 & 3 are here in orchestrations by Debussy, Gnossienne No. 3 by Poulenc, and Satie's own settings of La Piccadilly and En Habit De Cheval.  A hugely recommended collection.

 

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pw: sgtg 

Erik Satie at SGTG:

Piano Works

Gnossiennes/Ogives

Messe Des Pauvres

That's all, folks! (for now)

Time for a break.  Many, many thanks for all your comments over the past five years!

Back in a few months.  I'll leave you for now with some of the most perfect, timeless piano music ever written, in my favourite rendering by French pianist Pascal Roge, recorded 1983 and released the following year.

 

Happy new year to everyone, and here's hoping your 2021 is better than 2020 (not a high bar to clear, I guess).

Cheers,

AB

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Kim Kashkashian, Sarah Rothenberg, Houston Chamber Choir - Rothko Chapel (2015)

This album came up in the comments a short while back, so as promised, here it is.  Asked to curate a programme of music for a 40th anniversary concert at Rothko Chapel in 2011, Sarah Rothenberg, pianist and leader of the Da Camera organisation for chamber music in Houston, TX, chose to frame Morton Feldman's unique Rothko-inspired work with pieces by John Cage and Erik Satie.

The connection, Rothenberg explains in her lengthy liner note to this collection of 2012-13 recordings of the pieces in the programme, was that the three composers 'form a triumvirate of original creators who were each closely tied to the visual art of their time'.  And besides that, on this ECM New Series CD the programme just sounds great as a flowing, 70-minute immersion in some unique, inspired music.

Feldman's Rothko Chapel, written in tribute to the painter's great work just after his death, is the obvious opener to this collection.  Its sombre, eerie choral drift, piano backdrop and viola lead remain the perfect musical expression of Rothko's diffuse hints of colour on black backgrounds that graced the inner walls of the Houston chapel.

The remainder of the programme alternates between Rothenberg on solo piano playing inspired choices from Satie's Gnossiennes and Ogives, and the Houston Chamber Choir performing works by John Cage.  I hadn't heard any choral work by Cage prior to this disc, and the pieces here, Four², ear for EAR and Five, sit really well with the main Feldman work.  The programme closes with one of Cage's finest piano pieces, In A Landscape.

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Górecki, Satie, Milhaud, Bryars - O Domina Nostra (rec. 1992, rel. 1993)

Christopher Bowers-Broadbent's Trivium seemed to go down well the other week, so here's the organist's second ECM New Series release, again focusing on just three well-chosen composers.  The most striking difference with this album is that he's also joined for two pieces by Sarah Leonard, an English soprano with a particular interest in contemporary classical music, to great effect.

First up is the Górecki work that gives the album its name.  O Domina Nostra (1982-1985/90) takes inspiration from the iconography in a Polish monastery, and making stunning use of the deep organ drones set against the developing soprano part.  The organist is then featured solo in a vocal-less version of Erik Satie's Messe des Pauvres (1895) and a couple of Darius Milhaud Preludes from 1942, before Sarah Leonard returns for the stunning finale - Gavin Bryars' The Black River (1991), with its text from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.  Compared to the Trivium album, this collection is much more about subtlety and gradual shifts in atmosphere, making it a fascinating feast for the ears.

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