 Erik Satie The music of Erik Satie is usually described (or marketed, anyway) as being soft and languid, but in fact he wrote a lot of challenging pieces, and some that were genuinely off-putting (there's one called "Vexations" which consists of the same chord being played without augmentation for something like 850 times straight – I probably have that number wrong, but you get the picture). Satie was one of the most inarguably avant-garde composers of any compositional style in history, yet his music is regularly dismissed as lightweight or marginal by classical critics. This disc by Pascal Roge makes the best argument for Satie's brilliance and importance, and has not been bettered as an introduction to Satie's music. Satie wrote his best music for piano, and Roge is the preeminent pianist for French repertoire, so the recipe results in a Satie-rific bonanza of Roge-tastic proportions. (Typical classical lingo – sorry if I went way over your head.) The biggest selling point for this (and Satie in general) is Roge's performance of the three Gymnopedies, the first of which in particular (which opens the disc) is one of the two or three most to-die-for melodies ever composed. "Achingly beautiful" is not a phrase I toss around lightly (well, okay, there was the time I used it to refer to a particularly good fake nude of Jason Priestly, but I almost never use it to describe music), but this piece is one of the greatest things human ears can hear (dogs are directed to purchase the disc in Philips' new DDW format – that's "Digital Dog Whistle"). Apparently the first Gymnopedie is a common piano lesson warm-up, but that doesn't diminish it for me – most famous classical melodies are famous for a reason, usually the reason being they fuckin' rock. (Sorry, there I go with the academic language again. I should bring it down a notch.) The great strength of Satie's piano music lies in the feeling that the compositions are being improvised – there is a very free-form atmosphere that the works convey that prefigures new age music by almost 100 years. Roge is the ideal pianist for these works because he lets them move this way without bringing himself to the forefront. The disc sounds like a good new age solo piano album while simultaneously sounding undeniably like a good classical solo piano album. The Gymnopedies are complemented by the six Gnossiennes, which are similar to the Gymnopedies in their slow tempi and improvisational sound, but they are considerably more somber and enveloping (the liner notes describe them as "hypnotic," not inaccurate at all). These pieces sound very 20th Century, although they were written mainly in the 1880s and 1890s, indicating just how far ahead of his time Satie was. Apparently he was something of a crackpot, too, which always helps me to enjoy a musical icon. Many of his famous pieces wouldn't have bar notation on the sheet music, so that performers would not specifically know how long notes were to last or when exactly to move on to the next note. This is one of the things that keeps these pieces sounding fresh even a century later, when more structured classical pieces almost always sound like the musical period during which they were written. It's also one of the things that keeps classical music critics (or "snobs," as they say at the country club) from taking Satie very seriously. The remaining tracks include eight pieces other than the Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes, some of which sound akin to those works, but most of which (especially "Je te Veux") sound like Parisian silent-movie music (that's meant in a good way). These songs are a bit more formal and pigeonhole-able than the major works, but that doesn't make them less enjoyable at all. In fact, for the most part, the contrast between French cafĂ© zippiness and poets' graveyard spaciness serves to make the entire portrait of Satie presented by Roge a hugely appealing one. There are some intentionally jagged notes that get in the way of the flow (I admit, part of me says "But I like the pretty stuff!"), but without question this is a great disc and recommended for anyone with ears, classical music fan or not. I think that in another hundred years, when the ten or fifteen new age artists that are actually good have been accepted into the "serious music" mainstream, Satie will be revered as a titanic forefather. For this lifetime, though, we can know him as the extremely interesting character he was, and appreciate his amazingly beautiful music on discs like this one.
Review by Heavenly Hash |