Erik Satie’s reputation as a musical maverick and noncomformist (a hippie before his time, so to speak) struck a chord with music lovers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. All of a sudden, Satie became as fashionable as Tiny Tim and the musical Hair. Even Blood, Sweat, and Tears (of “Spinning Wheel” fame) covered Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, while a disc of Moog-synthesized Satie got 10 seconds’ worth of attention. The timing couldn’t have been better for Aldo Ciccolini to record almost all of Satie’s solo piano music for EMI, as well as overdub himself in selected piano duet works. At the dawning of the age of the compact disc Ciccolini remade the Satie project, but with a tinge of self-consciousness and posterity’s eagle eye hovering over the sessions.
Maybe Ciccolini didn’t follow Satie’s dynamics to the nth degree the first time around, but his playing seems more crisply contoured, spirited, and no more expressive than necessary. There’s none of Reinbert de Leeuw’s “look ma, slow hands” posturings, no Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes pumped up and weighed down with interpretive baggage. Ciccolini simply plays this music straight and makes it move, from the dashing character pieces in Sports et divertissements and lilting Nocturnes to the static, ceremonial Ogives, meditative Sonneries de la Rose + Croix, and the strangely elegant Sarabandes. Bits and pieces of Ciccolini’s first Satie cycle previously circulated on CD, but not the whole thing. For five CDs at budget price, you can’t get a better Satie deal on the planet. Too bad the texts are in French only. Ah, c’est la vie! Order this set now, before the catalog deletion police come a-calling.
