About this Artist

• Biography

Editorial Reviews

This box collects several recordings of Satie's piano music by Dutch pianist Reinbert de Leeuw, going back as far as 1977, with an English-language DVD (not reviewed, but the idea is attractive) including a fictionalized presentation of Satie's relationship with artist Suzanne Valadon (after they broke up, he hung in his window cataloging her faults, but the film apparently doesn't get to the fun stuff). The provenance of the music on the third CD, consisting mostly of songs and featuring soprano Marjanne Kweksilber, is unclear from the booklet, and it's a poor choice for the non-Francophone -- no song texts are provided at all. The piano music from de Leeuw is another matter, however. It is immediately distinctive in its slow tempos and dreamy, rather lugubrious tone. Listeners who prize Satie for his light, rather impish humor, or even those used to the usual tempos of the orchestrated version of the "Gymnopédie No. 1" (the piano version is heard on CD 1, track 15), may be put off initially by the performances here. Yet a look at the list of pieces and their recurring tempo indications (Lent, Grave) requires full consideration of de Leeuw's decisions. Along with Satie's iconoclasm and his quirky humor went a genuine mystical streak, expressed in an interest in Rosicrucianism as well as in music from the earlier eras of the Western tradition. It is this mystical streak that de Leeuw seeks to emphasize with his slowed-down Satie (who, let it be remembered, once wrote an 18-hour piece that called for a motive to be repeated 840 times). In works like the "Danses gothiques" (CD 2, tracks 14-19), some of which are under a minute long, de Leeuw presents a Satie who was less a gadfly to Debussy and Stravinsky than a predecessor of Mompou and, more distantly, the minimalists. The booklet presents a short, vivid picture of this unique composer. (You may have known that he walked from his piano-playing job in Montmartre to his drab suburban apartment to save on bus fare, but did you know that he carried a hammer to deal with muggers along the way?) These are not standard Satie readings, but they are worth having on hand for late-night listening -- under the influence, perhaps, of absinthe, Satie's drink of choice. James Manheim, All Music Guide

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