S-36774

PIANO MUSIC OF ERIKSATIE VOL5 Jack in the Box - Premier menuet Six pieces de la periode 1906-1913 Prelude de la porte herdi'que du ciel Musiques IntImes et secretes Carnet d’esquisses et de croquis Nocturnes Nos.4&5

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S-36774

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PIANO MUSIC OF ERIK SATIE VOL. 5_

ALDO CICCOLINI Side One (21:28) Jack in the Box Prelude—Entr'acte—Final Band 1 (6:35)

Six pieces de ia periode 1906-1913 Desespoir agreable—Effronterie—Poesie Prelude canin—Profondeur—Songe creux Band 2 (8:14)

Prieiude de ia porte heroique du ciei Band 3 (3:26)

Musiques intimes et secretes (rev. Robert Caby) Nostalgia—Froide songerie— Facheux exennple Band 4 (2:56)

Side Two (21:00)

Carnet d’esquisses et de croquis (rev. Robert Caby) Band 1 (14:41)

Premier menuet Band 2 (2:01)

Nocturnes Nos. 4 & 5 Band 3 (4:08)

It is one of the minor ironies of music that Erik Satie, a confirmed eccentric who went his own way and paid scant attention to the artistic aims of others, should have been the inspiration of so many composers, both among his contemporaries and among those who followed him.

His quasi-Gregorian early works, of which Prelude de la porte heroique du del is an outstanding example, left their mark on mu¬ sical mystics such as Georges Migot; and his free-floating ninth-chords, independent of underlying tonality, had considerable influ¬ ence upon both Debussy and Ravel. Ravel found inspiration, too, in the lucidity of the Gymnopedies, turning that quality to his own purposes in Ma Mere /'oye. Satie’s pre¬ occupation with popular music found its echo In the 1920’s scores of Les Six (Mil¬ haud, Poulenc, Honegger, Auric, Tailleferre, Durey), leading them to rebel against the ex¬ cesses of post-Romanticism in the direction of clarity and simplicity. Satie’s later piano music, including Cinq nocturnes (1919) and Premier menuet (1920), discovered a new Romantic vein, pure and devoid of rhetorical gesture. This development was to have an effect upon the influential Ecole d’Arcuell, a group of young musicians that took Satie as its mentor, and whose most prominent mem¬ ber was Henri Sauguet.

Nor was Satie’s influence confined to France. Certain aspects of his esthetic were adopted by the English composer Lord Ber¬ ners; and the American Virgil Thomson owes the Gallic master more than a passing debt, both in choice of musical materials and in general artistic outlook.

Satie’s influence, in one manner or an¬ other, extended far beyond his lifetime. One of the composer’s most audacious experi¬ ments was to pay dividends after he was in his grave. In 1920, together with Darius Mil¬ haud, Satie introduced to a startled public a revolutionary artistic concept, musique d'ameublement (“furnishing music’’). Its genesis sprang from a remark by Henri Ma¬ tisse, in which the painter yearned for an art devoid of any distracting subject matter, “something analogous to an armchair.’’ Mu¬

sique d'ameublement was initiated at an exhibition of paintings at the Galeries Barba- zanges, in the Faubourg St. Honore. While people strolled about looking at the pictures, a small group of instrumentalists played bits of familiar melodies, with certain musical phrases endlessly repeated, like the decora¬ tive patterns in textiles or like architectural details that echo one another. The gallery visitors were instructed to pay no attention to the music, but to behave as though it did not exist. “This music,’’the public announce¬ ment continued, “claims to make its contri¬ bution to life in the same way as a private conversation, a painting, or the chair on which you may or may not be seated. You will be trying it out.’’ Despite the warning, many of the gallery visitors stopped looking at the art on the walls and instead listened to the music. Satie was furious; approach¬ ing them he begged them to talk and to continue their rounds of the exhibition. Mu¬ sique d'ameublement was considered a huge joke by the public.

Although the concept was to have consid¬ erable impact on the works of Satie’s last years, it did not attain international recog¬ nition until some time after his death. Today we cannot escape it. Incidental film music, which Is meant to play its emotional role In the collective artwork without drawing at¬ tention to itself, is one example of musique d'ameublement; and its purest form is the canned music that assails us in elevators, supermarkets, dentists’ offices, and airport waiting rooms. Would it be stretching things to claim for Satie direct ancestorship of the Happening and of mixed media entertain¬ ments? Perhaps. But there exists a tenuous line of development leading to those forms, in which Satie figures prominently. Many of the experiments by John Cage utilizing Hap¬ pening and mixed media esthetics are, by the American musician’s admission, inspired by Satie’s example. For a composer of a small body of work, Erik Satie cast a long shadow indeed.

Jack in the Box (1899) was written for a pantomime by Satie’s friend Depaquit; the work was scheduled to be performed at the Comedie Parisienne. The composer said of it, “This pantaloonery consoles me a little and will be my way of making faces at the evil men who live In this world.’’ At that period of his life Satie was in a rather de¬ pressed mood. In 1898, the year before Jack, he had left Paris and had moved to the poor suburb of Arcueil, exclaiming, “I with¬ draw.’’ The dingy neighborhood, however, pleased him immensely (even though he had little to do with his neighbors); he said of it, “One feels here the mysterious presence of Our Lady of Lowliness.’’ One can readily imagine him walking home from Montmartre late at night, a hammer concealed in his pocket as protection against possible attack¬ ers, planning jaunty melodies for Jack in the Box or devising its ingenious, surprising harmonies. The work is in three movements (Prelude, Entr’acte, Final), each cast In the form of a Scottish jig. Was Satie when he composed this score remembering his Scot¬ tish blood, inherited from his London-born mother, or was it written merely in admiring recollection of countless similar cabaret tunes? The proposed performance of Jack eventually fell through, and the music itself was mislaid, not to be retrieved until after Satie’s death. It is one of his most infectious works, filled with verve and gaiety.

Six pieces de la periode 1906-1913 (Six Pieces from the period 1906-1913) reveals Satie in a mellower, more reflective mood. Feeling himself to be ill-equipped techni¬ cally, the composer, from 1905 to 1908, submitted to a course of musical instruction at the Schola Cantorum. When he entered the school he was almost forty. His early “Gothic” works had shown a highly devel¬ oped and daring harmonic talent; in addi¬ tion, unfortunately, there was in evidence a certain stiffness of conception. In his music of the first period Satie seldom attempted contrapuntal writing. His two favored com¬

positional approaches at that time were: first, lengthy series of block chords; and second, a single melodic voice in the treble over a rhythmically repetitive bass. His train¬ ing at the Schola endued his part-writing with fluency and grace; both characteristics appear in these compositions. Six pieces was discovered after Satie’s death and was published for the first time in 1968. The in¬ dividual titles are: "Desespoir agreable" (“Pleasant Despair”), "Effronterie,” "Poe¬ sie,” "Prelude canin” (“Doggy Prelude”). "Profondeur,” and "Songe creux” (“The Dreamer”).

Prelude de la porte heroique du del (Pre¬ lude from Heaven's Heroic Gate), written for a play by Jules Bois, is one of the most per¬ fect and fluid of Satie’s “Gothic,” or, Rosi- crucian, compositions. It is suffused with a pale, gentle light, as though from the sun filtering through a cathedral rose-window. It evokes a quiet drama, grounded in belief of things not quite of this world.

Musiques intimes et secretes, revised by Robert Caby, is a suite of short pieces ex¬ hibiting an extremely delicate sensibility. The music is stripped of all pretension, and the set is rather like the secret smile orie be¬ stows upon oneself when remembering in gratitude a touching scene, or a gracious gesture, or a tender conversation. The three

Photo: Jacques Verroust

ALDO CICCOLINI, pre-eminent advocate of the music of Erik Satie, is presented here in Vol. 5 in the highly acclaimed series of Angel recordings of the composer’s piano music (Vol. 1, S-36482; Vol. 2, S-36459; Vol. 3, S-36485; Vol. 4, S-36714). Addition¬ ally, he has made his record debut as conductor on Angel’s disc entitled “The Ir¬ reverent Inspirations of Erik Satie,” which comprises music for piano and violin, piano, songs and the one-act play with incidental music Le Piege de Meduse (S-36713).

Wrote Allen Hughes in the New York Times on the release of Vol. 4: “Here, as in his previous recordings, [Ciccolini] reveals his understanding of Satie’s music, by play¬ ing it simply, letting it speak for itself, un¬ sullied by overlays of irrelevant prettifying. The result is music that has a refreshingly clean and healthy sound. It poses no prob¬ lems, fights no battles and neither cries nor

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number R67-3967 applies to this recording.

pieces are: "Nostalgie,” "Froide songerie” (“Cold Musing”), and "Facheux exemple” (“Peevish Example”).

Carnet d'esquisses et de croquis (Note¬ book of Sketches and Rough Drafts), also revised by Caby, takes us directly into the composer’s workshop. Here are twenty frag¬ ments from different periods and in differ¬ ent styles, retrieved from Satie’s papers. Some are mere notations; others have at¬ tained a degree of elaboration. There are chorales, exercises, Montmartre-inspired cabaret tunes, a polka, an air, a dance. Un¬ cannily, each of them, whether elaborated or the simplest statement of an idea, is in itself a complete, seemingly finished thing. In performance there is no feeling of scrap¬ piness or of tentativeness. Together they present a fascinating collage of the com¬ poser at work, rather like a writer’s journal in which he notates scenes and conversations for future use.

Premier menuet and Nocturnes Nos. 5 & 6 are among Satie’s last piano works. In them, according to Rollo Myers, the com¬ poser “achieved that fusion of form and content on a purely musical plane towards which the serious musician in his strangely composite make-up had consciously or un¬ consciously been striving for three decades.”

— James Ringo

complains.” Said Irving Kolodin in Saturday Review: “In all instances, the Satie essence ... is served at maximum strength by Cic¬ colini. Excellent reproduction.”

Born in Naples, Aldo Ciccolini is one of Europe’s leading pianists. He has made a particularly glowing reputation as keyboard interpreter of the romantic composers, and in America he is well-known not only for his brilliant interpretations of Satie’s music, but for his distinguished recordings of works by Franck, D’Indy, Chabrier and Poulenc, which qualify him as one of the chief exponents of French piano works today. However, this in no sense limits him to the French genre, for his concert performances of music from Mo¬ zart, Beethoven and Schumann to Tchaikov¬ sky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Falla and Berg have won critical accolades.

Ciccolini was given his first piano lessons at the age of four, and was admitted to the Naples Conservatory of Music for classes in piano and composition by the time he was nine! In 1940 he won the Conservatory’s first prize for piano, followed three years later by first prize in composition. In 1947, at the age of 22, he became a teacher at the Conservatory, and in 1949 he won the grand prize for piano at the Marguerite Long- Jacques Thibaud Competition in Paris.

Fresh from his triumph in Paris, Cicco¬ lini made his American debut at Carnegie Hall in November 1950, with the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra under Di¬ mitri Mitropoulous, and toured throughout the United States the following year. Virgil Thomson called him “a powerful technician and a musician of impeccable taste, with an especial cleanliness and clarity all his own.” Since that time, Ciccolini has made a mag¬ nificent international career, concertizing throughout Europe, in North and South America and the Orient; he has played with most of the great orchestras and conductors of recent times.

Besides his music (he plays the piano or an average of five and seven hours a day), he is also an enthusiastic opera buff (“Some¬ day I dream of renting an opera house to conduct one of my favorite works”), and is a great fan of Crespin, Tebaldi and Flag¬ stad. A man of great energy and far-flung interests, he reads omnivorously and is an inveterate theater and movie-goer, prefer¬ ring the films of Hitchcock and Bergman.

Aldo Ciccolini became a French citizen in 1969, and when not making concert ap¬ pearances or on tours, he makes his home in Paris, where he was recently appointed professor at the Conservatoire National Su- perieur de Musique.

MANUFACTURED BY CAPITOL RECORDS, INC., A SUBSIDIARY OF CAPITOL INDUSTRIES, INC., HOLLYWOOD AND VINE STREETS, HOLLYWOOD. CALIFORNIA. FACTORIES: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, JACKSONVILLE, ILLINOIS, WINCHESTER, VIRGINIA j RECORD IS ENGINEERED A MANUFACTURED IN ACCORDANCE WITH STANDARDS DEVELOPED BY THE RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, INC., A NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION DEDICATED TO THE BETTERMENT OF RECORDED MUSIC & LITERATURE.

PRINTED

Piano Music of Erik Satie, Vol. 5 Jack In the Box . Six pieces de la peric Prelude de la porte heroTque du del

ALDO CICCOLINI (piano) S-1-36774 STEREO

33-1/3 Recorded

Piano Music of Erik Satie, Vol. 5 Carnet d'esquisses et de croquis Premier menuet • Nocturnes Nos. 4 & 5

S-2-36774 ALDO CICCOLINI (piano) STEREO

33-1/3 Recorded in France