A jazz musician - pianist and composer - plays Erik Satie. His stations: SOK, Synopsis, the Ulrich Gumpert workshop band (celebrated on international Festivals), the duo with G�nter Sommer; the trio with Radu Malfatti and Tony Oxley. Gumpert performing in a duo with Dietmar Diesner and Gumpertsolo, playing his own piano music - plain pieces of deep urge. It seems as if Gumpert inevitably had to come to Satie. It is not scores which are the essence of Satie's music but his attitudes. A pianist who feels strange with Satie's nature, can play the pieces key by key from the score and though disfigure them past recognition. l can't name any musician who is more able to play the early works of Erik Satie, than Ulrich Gumpert.

For Erik Satie, his whole life was a single theatre. Even his whimsical outfit was carefully staged: always the same suit, with melon and umbrella, but never unfolded to protect it . Steffen Schleiermacher now directs the spotlight on Satie's seventh series of piano works to his compositions for the stage, including Satie's last work ever, "Relâche", which brought together theatre, music and film in what was then a radically modern multimedia way. Steffen Schleiermacher is a pianist, composer, and festival and concert promoter. He studied piano (Gerhard Erber), composition (Siegfried Thiele, Friedrich Schenker) and conducting (Günter Blumhagen) at the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Academy of Music in Leipzig from 1980 until 1985. He was master pupil for composition with Friedrich Goldmann at the Academy of Arts in Berlin during 1986/87 and for piano with Aloys Kontarsky at the Cologne Academy of Music during 1989/90. Steffen Schleiermacher has concertized as a soloist with the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Deutsche Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Münchner Philharmoniker, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and other orchestras under Vladimir Ashkenazy, Friedrich Goldmann, Ingo Metzmacher, Wladimir Jurowski and Fabio Luisi. Schleiermacher's recordings amount to more than 80 albums.

This third volume of Erik Satie’s complete solo piano music using Satie scholar Robert Orledge’s new Salabert Edition focuses on music composed between 1892-1897, including theatrical scores such as the revolutionary uspud, and the Danses gothiques and famous Vexations written while the composer was hiding from a tempestuous love affair. The period closes with Satie composing in what he called “a more flexible and accessible way withthe final Gnossienne and the six Pieces froides.” Recognized at once as a great interpreter of Liszt’s music, Nicolas Horvath became in recent years one of the most sought after pianists of his generation. Holder of a number of awards, like the First Prize of the Scriabin and the Luigi Nono International Competitions, he frequently organizes events and concerts of unusual length, sometimes over twelve hours, such as Philip Glass complete piano music or Erik Satie’s Vexations.

The protean and prolific Jeroen van Veen turns his attention to Erik Satie’s complete piano works for a 9-CD boxed set that ties in with the composer’s 150th birthday year. In a way, the collection is completer than complete. It includes all of Satie’s published and unpublished works for solo piano and piano duo, piano arrangements of theater scores as Le fils des étoiles, Darius Milhaud’s transcription of Cinéma (the Entr’acte from the ballet Relache), plus van Veen’s duet arrangement of the first and third Gymnopédies in Debussy’s versions (replete with added arpeggios, percussive effects, and such). Van Veen also restores Parade’s opening Choral from the orchestral version that Satie omitted from his four-hand edition.

As if that weren’t enough, the final disc is given over to Vexations, the little piece Satie asks you to play 840 times in succession. Van Veen goes through it 47 times in 79 minutes, enough to make the point without having to endure 840 repetitions. However, should you feel shortchanged, Brilliant Classics has released a companion 18-disc set containing van Veen’s “complete” 23-hour-and-52-minute Vexations performance, but that’s another story, and another review.

As a Satie interpreter, van Veen shares with Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Aldo Ciccolini a kind of classical reserve without which the music can sound silly on the surface. However, he lacks these pianists’ brashness and dry wit in such ironically upbeat fare as the eight little pieces for Le piège de Méduse or Sur un casque from Descriptions automatiques. In slower selections such as the Gymnopédies and the Gnossienness, van Veen often favors dangerously drawn-out tempos, while playing down the expressive variety in larger multi-movement collections like the Sports et divertissements and the Douze petits chorals.

Still, van Veen’s beautiful and texturally varied sonority, his long-lined sensibility, and his intense focus draw you in. Sample the Nocturnes’ sustained, almost otherworldly serenity, or the subtle spacing of notes throughout the Véritables préludes flaques, and you’ll hear how completely and masterfully van Veen conveys his intentions, abetted by superb, full-bodied sonics. Sandra van Veen joins her husband for the piano duo selections, which stem from an earlier Brilliant Classics release that received a 10/10 rating from yours truly. The pianists’ airtight synchronicity, wide palette of articulations, and dapper stylishness remain reference-worthy.

In sum, while one might question van Veen’s conceptions of certain works as minimalist prototypes, the man’s awesome control and seriousness of purpose cannot be ignored. His fascinating and riveting pianism is well worth Brilliant Classics’ attractive budget price.

– ClassicsToday (Jed Distler)

Coming off the immense success of the Billboard-charting Let me tell you — which received rave reviews from the New York Times, NPR, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Wall St. Journal, and many more — Barbara Hannigan turns her attention to the work of Erik Satie as the musical world celebrates his 150th birthday. The disc focuses on one of the minimalist composer’s few elaborate masterpieces: the almost-forgotten vocal piece “Socrate,” on three Plato dialogues in French translation.

In celebration of Satie's 150th birthday, the venerable label Winter & Winter recorded a selection of works with the world-famous soprano Barbara Hannigan and pianist Reinbert de Leeuw, known for his outstanding Satie interpretations. “Socrate” is the central focus of the album, heard alongside “Trois Mélodies” from 1886, “Trois Autres Mélodies” from 1886–1906, and “Hymne” from 1891. Barbara Hannigan and Reinbert de Leeuw are two of the most important representatives of the contemporary classical music world.

For the fourth instalment in her acclaimed Satie cycle, Noriko Ogawa has gathered music written for the stage – from the pantomime Jack in the Box (1899) to the ballet Relâche (1924) – one of Satie’s last works. Several of the pieces exist in different scorings, but the piano versions heard here are all Satie’s own. Throughout the program, what comes across strongly is the influence of music hall and cabaret; composed in 1900, Prélude de “La mort de Monsieur Mouche” even offers a hint of the ragtime, one of the first appearances of the genre in European music. Stage projects are as a rule collaborative efforts, and among Satie’s collaborators were some of the leading names of the art world at the time, including Jean Cocteau, Picasso, the Dadaist poet and painter Francis Picabia, and film director René Clair. Satie’s score Cinéma has been called one of the first synchronized film scores.

Frank Glazer's performances of these idiosyncratic works have been winning kudos for decades. Includes 3 Gnossiennes; 3 Gymopeides; 5 Nocturnes; Sports Et Divertissements; Danses Gothiques and much more.

With Erik Satie, the connection between the beguilingly simple music and the sometimes very strange titles remains enigmatic: What is one to imagine by "Withered Embryos", "Penultimate Thoughts" or "Automatic Descriptions"? Steffen Schleiermacher does not even attempt an interpretation. In what is now the 8th installment of his Satie recording, he lets the associations work that the title, texts and playing instructions trigger. The result is music of that captivating clarity that Satie's avant-garde contemporaries admired so much in the eccentric maverick. The "cycles" collected here are mostly in three parts and all of them are surprisingly short, some move only in the five-tone range and seem to be almost children's pieces... And sometimes Satie borrows from deceased colleagues - and misleads both pianist and audience again: The motif of the "famous mazurka by Schubert" is - of course - neither by Schubert, nor is it a mazurka... "Sports et Divertissements" is completely out of the ordinary: Satie composed the total of 22 miniatures on commission as musical accompaniment to a collection of copperplate engravings by a famous fashion illustrator of his time. The pictures illustrate the leisure pleasures of the better-off, from tennis to sailing, and indeed one finds many a correspondence in the music - not without the usual eye-twinkling: the collection opens with an "unappetizing chorale"... For all the supposed simplicity of the music, Satie's manuscripts are true masterpieces of calligraphy, which, together with the curious playing instructions ("without blushing of the finger" - "from the tip of the eyes and held back in advance"), do not pass an artist like Steffen Schleiermacher by without leaving a trace. Incidentally, Satie expressly forbade the reading aloud of his bizarre texts - under threat of legal consequences...

On the present release, a jazz musician, pianist, and composer plays Erik Satie. Born in 1945, Ulrich Gumpert first began piano lessons with his father before going on to study in Weimar where he majored in French horn. Beginning in 1967 he performed in various bands with Klaus Lenz, and in 1971 co-founded the jazz rock group SOK. That same year he founded SYNOPSIS, from which the ZENTRALQUARTETT emerged in 1984. Ulrich Gumpert has developed an idiosyncratic personal style by using the experience of jazz and European music history in an original way. "Gumpert, who as a person never pushes himself to the fore, is also characterized by his modest reserve on his instrument. Without becoming particularly loud, particularly weird or particularly fast, he has found his very own tone: lyrical, warm, substantial, to the point. A quiet giant of German jazz." (Jazzclub Tonne)

An enigma of classical music, Erik Satie is still mysterious 150 years after his birth. The composer who declared himself ‘not fond of jokes,’ is regarded as one of the most eccentric and tricky composers of Western Music. London-based pianist Noriko Ogawa presents this first album of Satie’s piano works. In addition to a successful touring and recording career, Ogawa is also a professor at the Guildhall School of music and Drama in London, and is a visiting professor at the Tokyo College of Music. The instrument on which Noriko Ogawa performs these works is an 1890 Erard grand piano, built in the same year that Satie’s Gnossienne No. 1 was composed.

Of all the enigmas that surround Erik Satie and his music, Vexations is probably the most enigmatic. A ‘theme’ in the bass, with two different harmonizations, to be played – according to an ambiguous note on the composer's autograph – 840 times. That is at least how it has been interpreted since the first public performance, which lasted more than 18 hours and was organized by the composer John Cage in 1963. When Satie wrote Vexations is uncertain, and although it is usually assumed to be intended for a keyboard instrument, that is also impossible to confirm. There are no known performances of it in the composer’s lifetime, and the single-page manuscript was only discovered after Satie’s death. The many question marks surrounding the piece have made it a cult classic, and live performances – by a single pianist or several performers taking turns – are events that still attract attention, even if only a few in the audience sit out a complete performance. As part of her acclaimed Satie cycle, Noriko Ogawa now offers a bite-sized taste (142 repeats, 80 minutes long) of the ‘Vexation experience’, with a twist – as she explains in the liner notes she has chosen to perform Vexations in a manner that may seem controversial to purists: ‘Satie’s work is itself a challenge to conventional performing tradition, so why not challenge him?’

-----

REVIEW:

If it’s possible to have a Vexations breakthrough, it’s Ogawa’s new, probing reading of this soft-spoken piece. More than any previous encounter, I found myself thinking that maybe there really is something here.

Applying a free hand with tempo, phrasing, and general manner, she creates an overall contour, using each iteration like a building block in a larger edifice. Ogawa does meet Satie on his own ground by using a period piano, an 1890 Érard whose decay time (faster than modern pianos) offers a kind of rhythmic decisiveness. The music still may not know where it’s going, but it’s going there more purposefully.

– WQXR (105.9 FM, NYC) - (David Patrick Stearns)

This recording is also available as a mini disc.
This CD includes a multimedia portion.
THE GUITARIST could be described as a record of brooding reflection and pastoral solitude with echoes of ancient Greece a recurrent motif. It also demonstrates that one can plan a wonderfully varied yet coherent guitar recital without recourse to the usual Bach transcriptions and Spanish chestnuts.
No one is better equipped to do this than John Williams. As much an ambassador of the guitar as a player, he puts his commitment to new music for the instrument to good use here, the major dividend being the 'Koyunbaba' of Italian composer Carlo Domeniconi. Inspired by Turkish themes and landscapes, the four-movement suite employs an unusual C sharp minor tuning to haunting, original effect.
The 'Stele' of Australian Phillip Houghton are moody evocations of the Greek coastline and ancient monuments to gods, demons and sailors lost at sea, while the 'Epitafios' of Mikis Theodorakis eulogize the more recently departed with the direct simplicity of folk music. Rounded off with a suite of medieval tunes and a particularly successful arrangement of Satie's third 'Gymnopedie,' THE GUITARIST leads one down a darker, less traveled road full of drama and beauty.

For the fifth volume in her series of Erik Satie's piano music, Noriko Ogawa reaches back to an early period in the composer's life. A large part of the program comes from Satie's so-called mystical period. Influenced by medieval plainsong and avoiding all pathos, Satie resorted to austere melodies based on rhythms and harmonies simplified to the extreme; he turned away from the concepts of development and variation in favour of simple repetition of perfectly symmetrical phrases. In other words, he broke completely with the classical-romantic tradition. In its purity and abstraction, Satie’s music from this period seems surprisingly modern by comparison with that of his contemporaries. The title of this volume is Ésoterik Satie, a nickname given to the composer during the period when he began a collaboration with Joséphin Peladan, the grand-master of the ‘Rose-Croix catholique du temple et du graal’, an artistic movement close to symbolism and esotericism. Satie’s fascination for the Middle Ages is reflected not only in the music itself, but also in the titles of some works, such as Ogives (the pointed arches of Gothic architecture), Danses gothiques or Fête donnée par les Chevaliers Normand.

REVIEW:

Noriko Ogawa is a sure guide to these pieces. She plays them on an 1890 Erard piano, which has a bright, clear, rather shallow tone. The booklet is very informative, though the pieces are not played in the order in which they are discussed. These works are best taken a few at a time. Satie’s world is intense but it is also narrow, and the pieces here are all rather similar.

-- MusicWeb International

On Saturday October 6, 2018 at the Philharmonie de Paris, Nicolas Horvath sat down to perform Erik Satie's complete works for piano without a break. The event was captured in this fascinating film by acclaimed director Thierry Villeneuve and features selections from Horvath's marathon eight-hour performance, filmed in black and white. This immersive visual experience sees Satie's mysterious and timeless music brought to life in a dreamlike conflation of past and present in front of a captivated audience. Horvath wrote of the evening: "This concert was remarkable, the press coverage was incredible (all of the main media previewed it as a 'must see concert'). Curiously, and unlike everything I had prepared, or even in my very own recordings - performing all of a composer's music with no break at the very same concert takes you to unexpected territories. I was very surprised at the risks I took from time to time, both musically and technically. But listening to the whole eight hours of musical evolution makes clear that each decision was a logical part of a larger unity, as it was mirrored in other later pieces..."