Chapeau Suite. Xuefei Yang, guitar; Sharon Bezaly, flute; Héloïse Werner, mezzo-soprano. Platoon PLAT26708. Total Time: 49:00.
Shadows and Silence: The Erik Satie Project. Tessa Souter, vocalist and lyricist; Luis Perdomo, pianist, percussionist, and arranger. NOANARA Records NONA-01. Total time: 44.16.
DIGITAL REVIEW — Erik Satie is certainly a famous composer, but it’s a limited kind of fame. The reasons are many. Unlike Mahler or Wagner, who often went big, the eccentric French composer preferred to go small, mostly writing miniatures. At the same time, his free-form music can be elusive and dreamy, with unusual names like Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes, the titles of his two most oft-heard sets of solo works.
Satie (1866-1925) did write several ballets, including Parade, which Serge Diaghilev produced in 1917 with sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso and choreography by Léonide Massine, and ventured into some other forms including art songs and his only liturgical work, the Messe des Pauvres (Mass for the Poor).
But he stuck primarily to solo piano works, with an array of keyboardists, especially French ones, taking them on since his death. Among them is the now largely forgotten Daniel Varsano, who died in 1988 at age 34. He devoted his first recording in 1979 to Satie, a release that won the prestigious Grand Prix du Disque and gained the young pianist considerable recognition, particularly in the United States,
Indeed, Satie’s recognition has ebbed and flowed often as a result of how many pianists have championed his work at any given time. He is getting a renewed burst of attention in 2025, the 100th anniversary of his death, including a new round of recordings of his compositions. But if Satie was usually the domain of pianists in the past, soloists in other realms are laying claim to his music, with its appealing simplicity and openness.
Among them is Xuefei Yang, the first classical guitarist to earn a bachelor’s degree from China’s Central Conservatory of Music and first Chinese-born soloist on the instrument to build an international reputation. Yang has long been a Satie fan, and her latest album, Chapeau Satie, with its art-nouveau graphic design, is devoted to what she calls “reimagined interpretations” of his music, including selections from the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes, as well as some of his art songs with soprano Héloïse Werner. “Because his music is very simple and meditative — not many notes, his works are very well suited to be played on the guitar,” Yang said in an interview for the Colorado Music Festival.
It is impossible to disagree after listening to this captivating album. With a clear tone and direct, unfussy approach, the guitarist performs with a buoyancy, clarity, and kind of gentle propulsiveness that aptly suits this music. All these qualities are in evidence right from her performance on the opening track, Gnossienne No. 1, with its ideally unhurried yet never lagging tempo and intriguing air of mystery. Other highlights are the subtly seductive Gnossienne No. 4, with Yang’s wonderfully flexible sense of phrasing, and the unassuming yet appealing Petite Ouverture à Danser. Arrangements are always important in a project like this, and they are all sensitively handled by several contributors, including French classical guitarist and composer Francis Kleynjans, who is responsible for the bulk of the solo transcriptions.
In some of the 22 selections, Yang teams with one of two collaborators, as she does on Gymnopédie No. 1, and two other tracks with Sharon Bezaly, a first-rate Israeli flutist who has recorded extensively on the Swedish label BIS. The flutist, who brings a suitably translucent, floating tone to this music, takes what would be the right hand on the piano and Yang the left. These two are nicely matched, both solidly embracing the music and compellingly conveying its inward elusiveness. On 10 other selections, Yang pairs with Héloïse Werner, a French-British mezzo-soprano who lives in London, including Satie’s 1906 art-song cycle Trois autres Mélodies. Werner is a fine singer, but she comes off a bit overpowering in these songs, which arguably demand a lighter, perhaps more circumspect touch.
In the end, the tracks that work best are the ones with Yang one-on-one with Satie’s creations, offering thoughtful, transporting interpretations that make clear that this seemingly simple music isn’t so simple after all.
Jazz vocalist Tessa Souter presents another, very different take on Satie on a new album titled Shadows and Silence: The Erik Satie Project, adding lyrics she wrote to five of his works and combining them with four selections by other artists she found to have a resonance with Satie, like Wayne Shorter and Jacques Brel. The 10th track is a reading in French of the sole surviving letter Satie wrote to his lover, Suzanne Valadon, with the four bars of Satie’s Vexations repeated in the background on flugelhorn.
In her accompanying notes, Souter writes that her first inspiration to set lyrics to Satie’s music came in 2006 when she heard French jazz singer Anne DuCros’ improvised vocal arrangement of Gnossienne No. 1. But she didn’t act on the idea until the pandemic shutdown, when she had the time to work on the project, starting with “Rayga’s Song,” her take on Gymnopédie No. 1 inspired by the newborn son of her bassist, Yasushi Nakamura.
“On the 100th anniversary of Satie’s death, it feels appropriate to champion his genius,” Souter writes. “His dream, he once said, was ‘to be played everywhere, not only at the opera.’ That dream has certainly come true. But, despite his ubiquity, when I’d tell people I was working on a Satie project, I was shocked to find that a lot of people didn’t know who he was, even though they’d recognize his music after I’d hummed a few bars.”
This project will probably ruffle the feathers of Satie purists, but it’s hard to believe that the ever-experimental composer wouldn’t have approved of Souter’s creative derring-do, and it has to be said that she works very hard to be respectful of her source material. It’s important to judge these takes on their own terms, and they absolutely succeed in their reinterpreted way, especially “Peace” (Gnossienne No. 2), a hushed, reflective song about our presence in the bigger world that begins with the evocative words, “Floating in the turquoise up above me . . .” One of the most daring and striking of the Satie arrangements is “D’où venons-nous” (Gymnopédie No. 3), an unexpectedly up-tempo, emphatic version with a bowed bass opening, abundant percussion, and the free-styling sounds of soprano saxophonist Steve Wilson, who has a long, impressive solo midway through.
Souter is a commanding if understated vocalist who possesses a penetrating, straight-on, and non-ornamented style that befits Satie and these songs. The Satie selections are all arranged by her fine pianist, Luis Perdomo, who has a good feel for the composer’s music and gives these takes the spaciousness and contemplative quality they need.
