Satie, Erik - Piano Music, Vol. 1 (SACD) - Ogawa, Noriko

Noriko Ogawa, piano (Érard grand piano, built in 1890)

150 years after his birth, Erik Satie remains one of the great enigmas of classical music – a composer who said of himself, "I don't like jokes... I never joke," but who is still considered one of the great pranksters of Western music. He was once involved in esoteric communities such as the Rosicrucian Brotherhood and founded his own church (the Metropolitan Art Church of Jesus the Conductor), but he could also be strikingly down-to-earth, preferring to be described as a "phonometrician" rather than a "musician" and inventing the genre of "furniture music": "essentially industrial" and fulfilling the same role as "light, heat, and all forms of comfort." In this anniversary year, Noriko Ogawa is releasing a complete collection of Satie's solo piano music – a collection of works that includes the Gnossiennes and Gymnopédie, which have reached and influenced audiences around the world through countless film soundtracks, pieces that Satie wrote for his own use while working as a bar pianist (Je te veux, Le Piccadilly), parodies of other composers (Sonatine byrokratia is a parody of Clementi's sonata), and experiments such as Vexations, a theme with a short chord accompaniment that, according to the score, is to be played 840 times! Noriko Ogawa's extensive and acclaimed discography includes music by Mozart and Rachmaninoff, as well as complete recordings of piano music by her compatriot Toru Takemitsu and Debussy (a friend of Satie). She performs all of this on an instrument from Satie's own era – a magnificent Érard grand piano built in 1890, the same year that Satie composed Gnossienne No. 1, which opens this album and the new cycle.