Kind of Satie, New music around Erik Satie

Pandolfo, Andrea, Pandolfo, Paolo, Rinaldi, Michelangelo

GCD P30416

The Kind of Satie title and "New music around Erik Satie" subtitle are a bit mystifying, but what you're actually getting here is even odder than what those may suggest. The album, say the performers, "is a journey into Satie's poetics, filtered through our own musical sensibilities as musicians with many years of shared, out-of-the-ordinary, and by no means 'mainstream' experimenting with sound styles all behind us." This is not a felicitously phrased mission statement, but the saving grace is that the whole thing represents a kind of whimsical experimentation that, one suspects, Satie would have enjoyed and found congenial. The album is based on a couple of Satie works, the Sonnerie de la Rose+Croix (which appears more or less intact, arranged for the performers' little trio) and the Sports et Divertissements, which show up in bits in pieces and, in tone or in melodic material, inspire the whole, which consists mostly of new compositions in a Satie mood, and of improvisations. If that weren't enough, you have Impassibile infiammato, a Satie performance direction realized as an original composition. It's quite a jumble, but listen and you will enjoy: the music is lively, especially when Michelangelo Rinaldi's toy piano gets into the act, and again, Satie, if alive today, would have been on board. Glossa's sound is excellent, and the illustrations by Tinka Volaric add fun to the picture.

CD x 1

Glossa

28/03/2017

8424562304161