Ikiru Plays Satie

The present installment of Arturo Sacchetti’s encyclopedic Organ History survey for Arts Music drops anchor in late-19th/early-20th-century France. It can be argued that the five instrumental sections from Satie’s Mass for the Poor that open this recital lose poignancy when shorn of their surrounding vocal movements, although the organ is a perfect instrument for the composer’s quirky, instantly identifiable harmonic language. By contrast, D’Indy’s Les Vêpres du Commun des Saints, Roussel’s Prélude et Fughetta, and Honegger’s Deux Pièces pour Orgue make an arid, academic impression. After Wayne Marshall’s pulverizing speed through the Pastorale by Roger-Ducasse (Virgin Classics), Sacchetti’s relatively conservative virtuosity proves less engaging. However, his incisive hand/foot coordination enliven Tournemire’s Improvisation on “Te Deum” and Langlais’ Hymne d’Actions de grâces “Te Deum”, although the latter yields to Andrew Herrick’s more vivid and better engineered traversal on Hyperion. Organists looking for an effective, unhackneyed encore should consider Ibert’s Musette or Milhaud’s Pastorale.

Fazil Say brings a composer’s approach to these two strangely complementary French figures. He plays with a delicacy and restraint, almost as if a veil had been thrown over the piano: colors are subtle, rhetoric replaced by intimate whispers. He brings Debussy’s lovely Préludes vividly to life, his personality glinting off the notes, each miniature painted with tiny brushstrokes. Satie’s Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies, epigrammatic and wistful, are done with the perfect amount of reverence balanced with a cheeky smile. The piano is nicely recorded in an ambience that perfectly fits these infinitely rewarding small creations.

Kanji Watanabe is a longtime bureaucrat in a city office who, along with the rest of the office, spends his entire working life doing nothing.

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".