FREE UK SHIPPING OVER £30!

Erik Satie - Piano Music Vol.1 | BIS BIS2215

Erik Satie - Piano Music Vol.1

£12.69 £9.52

save £3.18 (25%)

special offer ending 01/04/2024

In stock - available for despatch within 1 working day

Label: BIS

Cat No: BIS2215

Barcode: 7318599922157

Format: Hybrid SACD

Number of Discs: 1

Genre: Instrumental

Release Date: 1st July 2016

Contents

About

150 years after his birth, Erik Satie is still one of the great enigmas of classical music – a composer who said of himself ‘I am not fond of jokes… I never make jokes’ but is nevertheless regarded as one of the great tricksters of Western music; who at one stage was involved with esoteric societies such as the Rosicrucian Order and founded a church of his own (the ‘Metropolitan Art Church of Jesus the Conductor’), and inventing the genre ‘furniture music’ that, for Satie, was ‘fundamentally industrial’, similar to ‘light, heat and all the forms of comfort’.

In this anniversary year, Noriko Ogawa launches a complete set of Satie’s music for solo piano – a body of works which includes the sets of Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies, which through their use in countless movie sound tracks have reached and affected audiences across the planet, pieces that Satie wrote for his own use when working as a bar pianist (Je te veux, Le Piccadilly), parodies on other composers (Sonatine bureaucratique is a spoof on a sonata by Clementi) as well as experiments such as Vexations, a brief theme with chordal accompaniment which according to an instruction in the score is to be played 840 times! Noriko Ogawa, whose wide-ranging and acclaimed discography includes music by Mozart and Rachmaninov as well as complete recordings of the piano music by her compatriot Toru Takemitsu and by Debussy (a friend and rival of Satie’s) performs all of this on an instrument from Satie’s own time – an exquisite Erard grand piano built in 1890, the very year that Satie composed his Gnossienne No.1 which opens this disc and new cycle.

Reviews

This disc also rewards repeated listening. Ogawa’s nuances are, rightly, subtle and one can miss them first, or even second time round. The choice of a clean, crisp 1890 Erard is excellent for this music, and it’s very good news that this disc is Volume 1 in a collection of all Satie’s solo piano music.  Roger Nichols
BBC Music Magazine September 2016

Error on this page? Let us know here

Need more information on this product? Click here