Classical Music | Ensemble Music

Erik Satie

La Diva de l'Empire (arr. Easley Blackwood)  Play

Chicago Chamber Musicians Ensemble
Patrice Michaels Soprano

Recorded on 11/05/2000, uploaded on 04/01/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes
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Erik Satie (1866-1925): Songs

Perpetually stimulating for artists of all types, France's blend of fresh thought and strong tradition is exemplified by Erik Satie. Throughout his creative life, Satie sought to avoid the inauthentic, the falsely emotional, the unobservant glance at the commonplace. In artistic circles, Satie was a peripatetic disturber of the peace. He is owed a great debt by countless others (including the group of subsequent French composers known as "Les Six") who emu­lated and developed his ideas of harmony, melodic line, and musical architecture.

Satie's music does not order itself into one style. The songs presented here include three parlor tunes alongside several minia­ture art songs. Tendrement and the forth­right, heady Je te veux would be perfectly at home in a popular music hall, and La Diva de l'Empire could easily become a vehicle for a fin du siècle grisette. In the latter, however, Satie's uncompromising compositional integrity helps his listener focus vividly on the "leetle girl" with the mocking smile. In the two waltzes, a pre­dictable lilt never obscures Satie's erotic intention and appreciation for his poets' ability to surprise. For this recording, arrangements of La Diva and Je te veux were commissioned from composer Easley Blackwood.

Satie's art songs have a bracing directness; they never dissemble. When the text ends, so does the music. Elegie is an unblinking, sad look backward, not without a certain theatricality. By contrast, Sylvie is a shy, adoring paean to a beloved, set over a modulating accompaniment moving in cir­cular patterns. The art songs were arranged by Robert Caby (1905-1992), a composer and ardent admirer of Satie's music. A former classmate of Jean-Paul Sartre, Caby knew Satie for little more than a year, but became a close friend who devotedly visited the elder composer at Paris's Saint-Joseph Hospital until Satie's death on July 1, 1925. For the remainder of his own life, Caby kept fresh his devotion through the editing and orchestration of Satie's works and by contributing numerous articles to music journals. Caby employed winds and strings (as does Blackwood) to expand upon, yet respect, the brisk simplicity of the original piano accompaniments. A sub­tle use of accent instruments (such as the clock-like percussion blocks in Daphénéo and the harp figures in Les Anges) keeps the music buoyant.


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