SATIE: Piano Pieces
Christina Bjorkoe—OUR 8226929—60 minutes
Satie is a composer I have never paid any attention to. After hearing his popular Gymnopédies and a few other pieces I thought I had heard enough, and I don’t have a single recording of his music. Have I been missing anything?
Not on the evidence of this recording. To mark the centenary of the composer’s death, here are 27 miniatures for piano, selected from the more obscure corners of his oeuvre and ranging in duration from 0:44 to 4:27 minutes. All have titles, some of them weird, and are slow, quiet, and gentle. They are tremendously boring, especially when heard in sequence. Only two or 3 of the longer ones have some (still very limited) variety of tempo and dynamics. They don’t express any moods or feelings, and their titles are entirely interchangeable. Satie called some of his pieces (not included here) Desiccated Embryos, and that is more or less what all of them are. It is difficult to believe that they were highly admired by his contemporaries, including Debussy and Ravel.
The Danish pianist plays them with dedication and sensitivity but too much rubato. When they are treated like late romantic music, the rhythm sometimes gets lost. A more detached, “objective” rendition might be more appropriate. Alan Becker wrote in a review of an earlier Satie recording (N/D 2017), “Playing it straight might even have appealed to the composer, but most per-78 American Record Guide November/December 2025 formers cannot resist inserting a bit of them selves and a bit of expression.” This was actually meant as a gentle critique of an “ascetic and brittle” performance, but I side with the alleged preference of the composer, without endorsing brittleness.
I can recommend the booklet, which contains a fine essay by Torben Enghoff, beautiful illustrations, an artist biography, and an extensive display of the covers of other releases by this label. And I did enjoy Poulenc’s playing of Satie pieces (this issue) more than this recording. Gorman