Erik Satie - Le bel excentrique [Best of]

To celebrate the centenary of the composer's death, this compilation offers a journey through Erik Satie’s unusual and distinctive piano works, by three of his greatest performers: Anne Queffélec, Bertrand Chamayou and Aldo Ciccolini. Bonus: his third Gnossienne orchestrated by Francis Poulenc, under the baton of Michel Plasson.

Erik Satie occupies a special place in the history of French music. Some see him as a hoaxer, others as a major avant-garde personality or an astonishing forerunner of surrealism. He was a colourful, comical, but lonely character, pianist at the Chat Noir club in Montmartre. His formidable fits of temper often led him into long-lasting quarrels – Debussy and Ravel felt the brunt of them – and he described himself as “a composer of musical furniture (…) who came very young into a very old world”. He never completed the studies he had started at the Paris Conservatoire, his teachers decrying his preference for practising his distinctive signature rather than practising the piano. Before long, he cultivated a bohemian life-style, frequenting Parisian cabarets, where he was introduced as ‘Erik Satie – gymnopédiste’, which relates to a naked dance. Not long afterwards, in 1888, he produced three short pieces for piano, called Gymnopédies…

According to Poulenc, Satie was very fond of the piano, though he was only a mediocre pianist. His output for piano is vast, showing all aspects of an art which took him from classicism to the haze of impressionism, and from bar-piano music to the mysticism. From his first little pieces to La belle excentrique, a “serious fantasy” with echoes of the music-hall, his output for piano is made up of relatively short pieces, with enigmatic markings as to tempo and dynamics, and strange titles. “It is quite obvious that those who are flattened, nondescript, or bloated will take no pleasure in it at all,” said Satie in his ironic way. One of Cocteau’s sayings was: “Satie’s music goes around quite naked.” Without abandoning the poetry and the half-serious, half-joking, parodistic humour, in general his style turns its back on virtuosity, eschews mannerism and exploits daring harmonies to the point of polytonality. “Although music has no charms for the deaf, even if they are dumb as well, that’s no reason to despise it,” Satie quipped, with a twinkle.