François Allot

Paris, early Twentieth Century: in the space of three ballets, a previously unknown Russian composer revolutionised the music of his time. With The Firebird and Petrushka, respectively fairytale and folktale, and of course The Rite of Spring, a telluric invocation with its insanely innovative harmonies and rhythms, Stravinsky dynamised the Late Romantic orchestra, taking it to literally unheard-of places.

Erik Satie is a beacon around which all kinds of musicians never cease to turn and marvel. And it’s been the case for more than 100 years. American minimalists (Glass, Reich, Adams, Riley, La Monte Young) today recognize in him a kind of spiritual father. Through this double-disc, I wanted to pay a tribute to him, through his works but also those of his friends, his followers and his heirs. I thus discovered new works never recorded (Cliquet-Pleyel, Mesens, Dortu, Fargeat) and also generated new compositions. My personal approach to sincerity also led me to choose, for the interpretation of his works, a piano that he could have known: a Blüthner from 1900. As a historically well-informed musician, the last track of the first disc, Je te veux, has been recorded on Pleyel droit from 1923, not very well tuned, with hazardous mechanics and a good cabaret taste. Here is a particular discographic object with very subjective musical choices. After three records dedicated to some American figures (Moondog, Glass and Hovhaness) I was dead set on showing how important Erik Satie was for a few musicians, and to illustrate how he is a tutelary and smiling figure of a contemporary musical movement open to side steps - let's call them minimalists or not, it doesn't matter. I have brought together all these figures under the term "gymnopedists".

Few composers can boast of their music being performed during their lifetime by people like Serge Rachmaninov or Keith Jarrett. Even fewer could claim to be admired by Ornette Coleman, Philip Glass, Leopold Stokowski or Ravi Shankar, and to have had the support of John Cage himself or the great choreographer Martha Graham. The American composer Lou Harrison (also a friend) said "he was one of the greatest melodic writers of the 20th century". And yet Alan Hovhaness remains unknown in France.

Marin Marais published his Quatrième Livre de Pièces de Viole two years after the death of Louis XIV, establishing himself as the undisputed master of the genre and providing pieces not only for musicians who had achieved some skill on the viol but also for the most virtuoso players. Here Marais reshaped the classical forms, altering the traditional sequence for the suites and making an increasing use of character pieces. The sometimes whimsical imagery and the new freedom of form that these pieces contain reach their peak in the astonishing Suitte d'un goût étranger; these thirty or so pieces employ as yet unheard-of keys and offer a multitude of characters and representations that can tend towards the exotic. Breaking further new ground, and somewhat influenced by the Italian trio, Marais ended the Quatrième Livre with two suites for three viols, a genre he claimed to be new to France.

Saint-Saëns's first opera, Le Timbre d'argent initially composed in 1864 need not fear comparison with some of the most celebrated works in the nineteenth-century French repertory. It depicts the nightmare of a man whose hallucinations anticipate by twenty years the fantastical apparitions of Offenbach's Les Contes d Hoffmann.