SATIE The Music for Piano (complete)
Erik Satie (1866-1925)
Aldo Ciccolini, piano 2 & 4 hands
EMI Classics 5 74534 2
Satie’s Piano Universe: Ciccolini’s Indispensable Monument
How peculiar that this set should remain—what, fifty-odd years after its original release?—the only complete traversal of Satie’s piano music that matters. Oh, there have been others. But Aldo Ciccolini’s EMI recordings from the late sixties and early seventies possess something that eludes even the most technically accomplished modern competitors: an understanding that Satie’s simplicity is a mask, not a confession.
The five discs here contain everything. The three Gymnopédies, naturally, those strange little creatures that everyone knows and almost no one hears properly. Ciccolini plays them without the sentimentality that has barnacled itself to these pieces over the decades—no lingering, no swooning, just the bare architecture of the thing exposed like winter branches. The tempo for the first Gymnopédie feels almost brusque at first hearing, but it’s right. This isn’t salon music for dreaming; it’s something colder, more distant.
Then there’s the vast sprawl of the rest: the Gnossiennes (all seven, including the ones Satie didn’t number), the Rose-Croix music with its medievalisms and mock-liturgical solemnity, the café-concert pieces that smell of absinthe and gas lamps. Ciccolini navigates these radically different worlds with a consistency of approach that’s revelatory—he treats the music hall ditties with the same seriousness as the mystical utterances, and this, paradoxically, allows each piece’s character to emerge more sharply.
What strikes me most forcefully in this traversal is how Ciccolini handles the notorious repetitions. Take “Vexations,” that notorious piece meant to be played 840 times in succession (he wisely gives us just one iteration here). Or the Heures séculaires et instantanées, where the same material circles back with slight variations and those wonderfully absurd reading directions. Lesser pianists either apologize for the repetitions by adding interpretive “interest” or else turn them into a Minimalist drone avant la lettre. Ciccolini does neither. He plays what’s written—each time as if it were the first and only time, with a clarity of articulation that reveals how much variety Satie actually built into these ostensibly static surfaces.
The recorded sound holds up remarkably well, though it’s of its period. There’s a slight boxiness to the piano tone in some of the earlier sessions, a compression that modern ears might find wanting. But the instrument itself—captured with what sounds like fairly close microphone placement—has real presence, real weight in the bass. You can hear the hammers hit the strings in the Sports et divertissements, that marvelous collection of miniatures where Satie’s visual imagination (he provided his own calligraphic manuscript, complete with drawings) meets his musical wit.
Speaking of wit: Ciccolini gets the jokes. This matters enormously with Satie, whose humor has been flattened by decades of either too-earnest veneration or condescending dismissal. The “Bureaucratic Sonatina” needs its pomposity pricked; “Embryons desséchés” requires its pseudo-scientific annotations to register as the send-ups they are. Ciccolini’s touch—never heavy, always precisely weighted—allows the irony to breathe without winking at the audience.
The four-hand works, performed with an uncredited partner (I believe it’s Gabriel Tacchino, though the documentation is frustratingly vague), show another side of Satie’s genius. Trois morceaux en forme de poire isn’t pear-shaped at all, of course—that’s the joke—but it is substantial, nearly twenty minutes of music that drifts between café waltz and something approaching genuine emotion. The two pianists blend their sounds beautifully, maintaining the transparency that this music requires. No muddiness, even in the thicker textures.
I keep returning to the late pieces, the Nocturnes and the Avant-dernières pensées. Here Satie strips away even the vaudeville masks, and what’s left is strange indeed—harmonies that seem to float free of any tonal center, melodies that begin and simply stop, as if the composer lost interest or found what he was looking for. Ciccolini plays these with a kind of patient attention that feels almost clinical, yet the effect is oddly moving. He trusts the music to do its work.
The packaging is superbudget, which means minimal documentation and no libretto for the vocal texts that Satie sometimes embedded in his scores. This is a real loss—those texts matter, especially in pieces like Le piège de Méduse. But the discs themselves, at this price point, represent one of the genuine bargains in the catalog.
Does this set supersede all comers? Nearly. Anne Queffélec’s more recent recordings have a pearly beauty that’s hard to resist, and Jean-Yves Thibaudet brings a different kind of sophistication to the better-known pieces. But for wide-rangingness, for stylistic authority, for sheer rightness of approach—Ciccolini remains essential. His Satie isn’t a curiosity or a precursor to something else. It’s simply music, played with intelligence and respect and just enough affection. That turns out to be exactly enough.
