Timed to coincide with the centenary of the French composer’s death, Satie Surprises is noteworthy for many things, including the absence from Christina Bjørkøe’s hour-long recital of his ever-popular Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes.
While their inclusion would have been in no way objectionable, it’s refreshing to see the Denmark pianist fashioning a programme featuring pieces less commonly presented. The listener beguiled by the lyrical tenderness of the music might be surprised to discover how eccentric Satie (1866-1925) could be. A multi-faceted portrait emerges from Torben Enghoff’s in-depth liner notes, which, by his own admission, are less about the pieces presented on the recording and more Satie’s life and music.
Tag Archive: Erik Satie
To know Erik Satie a century on from his death is likely to know either Trois Gymnopédies or the later Gnossiennes. Amid the progressive milieu of fin de siècle Paris, Satie brought a clarity through simplicity (though not, it should be pointed out, ease) that cast aside centuries of escalating compositional excess running hot in the blood of contemporaries like Wagner, Strauss, Mahler and Rimsky-Korsakov elsewhere in Europe. Each of Satie’s series were harbingers of the coming century, belatedly credited in some circles as the origin of modern ambient music. As Dutch conductor and professor Reinbert de Leeuw once observed, “Satie was, in a manner of speaking, starting European musical history all over again.”
Interestingly, though, Satie wasn’t a radical in…