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Erik Satie

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I’ve been listening to Erik Satie a lot lately. I’ve always liked his music from when I first heard one of the Gnossiennes on the radio as a teenager – my ears pricked up and I had to go and check the listings in The Listener (the New Zealand equivalent of the Radio Times) to find out what it was. I would then have visited either the public library or the French Embassy library (which my piano teacher had told me about) and found a whole LP of his piano music. I was hooked.

Last year was the centenary of his death, and there were a few albums released to celebrate that event. One of them was my AW album of the year, the Chinese classical guitarist Xuefei Yang’s – Chapeau Satie.

There are a couple of other box sets that celebrate Satie’s music.

1. Erik Satie: Old Sequins and Ancient Breastplates. Historical recordings 1926-1961. It’s a 4CD box set compiled by our friends at Cherry Red. The first disc is Italian pianist Aldo Ciccolini’s interpretations of Satie, which for me are the best. Most of Disc 2 is Satie’s contemporary Francis Poulenc performing Satie’s piano music. Discs 3 and 4 are Satie’s orchestral music.

2. Erik Satie Et Autres Messieurs (from my schoolboy French “Erik Satie and other gentlemen”) – “Airs de Jeux”. Disc One is various composers’ pieces inspired by Satie, Disc 2 is a great idea – alternating Satie and Debussy piano piece.

I’ll post links to all these in the comments

For me Satie’s music is music I play when I’m not sure what I want to listen to. (I guess that could be another thread).

Any further recommendations most welcome

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Comments

  3. Unsurprisingly Satie was a an art school staple and the first album of some of his piano music I owned was by Aldo Ciccolini. I still enjoy his playing but he has been joined by Jean Yves-Thibaudet who released a complete piano music of Satie some time ago on four CDs. There is also a cut down version called The Magic of Satie which is much easier to find. However if you’re looking for a virtually complete collection of Satie’s work then Tout Satie! a 10 disc boxset released on the Erato imprint is pretty faultless. I know this as I own a copy. It can be found at Amazon amongst other outlets for around £30 bps. I believe there is a very minor piece missing from the box but that’s nothing really anyone would miss.
    Here’s Dave Hurvitz banging on about it.

    • There’s also a 6CD boxed set on Erato containing all of Ciccolini’s piano recordings of Satie, including those on which he accompanied a vocalist.

      • There’s a whole lot of Satie going on. Everything in the 6 CD box is replicated in the 10 CD box. The classical music industry is a mess with releases carved up into single disc, double disc, triple disc etc and various box sets of varying sizes all containing much the same or exactly the same recordings to one degree or another. If I sat down to go through my classical discs to sort it all out it would take me months, so I don’t as the very thought gives me a headache. Satie’s Parade is a case in point. I have identical recordings three times in three different box sets.

        • I tried to purchase the 10CD boxed set back during lockdown, but it was out of stock., so went for the 6CD set instead.

          Some of these boxes do eventually get re-pressed, or if the demand is low, they may only be made available as downloads. Others disappear, usually due to rights issues of some sort – with some of the larger boxes some obscure works have to be licensed from other labels.

          • Yep. There are a few out of print that I’d happily shell out for but I’m not holding my breath. I keep my eye on release schedules and if something I want pops up I pre-order it as soon as I can usually via Presto Music. I’m waiting on a shipment from them this week which should have been delivered last Friday but it’s been delayed. Fingers crossed.

            • An update on the aforementioned shipment from Presto, not that anyone gives toss. It was, note the was, a boxset of the complete Praga Digital recordings of The Kocian Quartet. Praga have eventually decided to cancel production and remove it from pre-order. Ah well I’ll just stream the discs I really wanted from the box on Qobuz instead. Presto have reimbursed me.

  5. Another lover of Satie’s piano music here.
    I too have the Thibaudet 4-CD set, plus an older single CD cheapo Satie compilation “Piano Dreams: The Erik Satie Collection”, recorded at various times 1984-1997 by Pascal Rogé for Decca.

    I once saw BJ Cole and Emily Burridge performing a couple of Satie and Debussy pieces, plus some things of their own, pre-lockdown at the Union Chapel in London. It was amazing.
    There are clips of BJ performing all manner of stuff that isn’t “country” on pedal steel on YouTube.

  6. I remember watching an advert for Galaxy chocolate in the early 70’s with beautiful music playing in the background. It was years later I found out it was Erik Satie.

  8. I’ve been listening to Satie for some decades now – Ciccolini’s CFP album was probably the first. I’ve heard a few pianists since then – but I think my current favourite is by Anne Queffelec (who also, incidentally, plays some nice Ravel)…

  10. I first heard Satie when I was at university and someone sat down and played Gnossienne No. 1 on piano from memory. It remains one of my favourite pieces of music, redolent of its era and evoking the peace and quiet of the deep French countryside. There is nothing more haunting and nothing more, er, French.

  13. Inspired by this thread, I’ve been poking around looking for stuff I didn’t know. (Spoiler alert: there’s loads.)

    Above all, there’s this: Vexations. To quote Wikipedia: ‘it consists of a short theme in the bass whose four presentations are heard alternatingly unaccompanied and played with chords above…The piece bears the inscription “In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.”

    Unsurprisingly, John Cage was a fan, and staged the first performance in 1963. 840 times with multiple pianists added up to about 18 hours, but Igor Levit on YouTube knocks it off in just under 12. Why not watch it if you have 12 hours to kill?

    Here’s a snippet.

  15. I first became aware of Satie’s music as a pre-teen, back in the days of radio plays and weekly radio readings of novels; one of his saddest and most beautiful pieces was the theme music to one such novel serial about a gay teenager killing himself (IIRC), which me and my sister listened to every week while eating a Maynard’s Soft Nougat each.
    Since then, that particular piece is known by me as “The Suicide Music”.
    Didn’t stop me from buying a CD box of his works some years later, and I love most of it.
    (I confess I have no clue who performs the music on said CD!)

    Edit: Oh, and the epistolary biography by Ornella Volta is brilliant too!

  17. Coincidentally last night my partner curated an event at the Akademie der Kunst in Berlin to commemorate the centenary of the French artist Robert Filliou, a contemporary of Satie’s. During the evening, a Swiss pianist Tomas Bachli periodically performed short solo pieces by Satie – I can’t catch all the names of the works as they were introduced in a fast rattle of German, but there was a polka, a ‘militaire’ inspired piece and plenty of action with a prepared piano. The pianist gave a short talk about Satie afterwards – I didn’t know much about him and learned a great deal about his rather idiosyncratic and combative personality!

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