The selling point of this album – the first in a new survey of Erik Satie’s piano music – is the fact that the instrument featured is an Érard from 1890, the same year Satie started work on his stunningly weird and hypnotic Gnossiennes. But that novelty factor only goes so far when there’s a harshness to the piano’s sound, or at least to the way Noriko Ogawa plays it. True, the music world has a tendency to typecast Satie as a gentle eccentric and interpretations of his music often overdo the cuteness, but Ogawa’s hammered-out Gymnopédies and angular Je Te Veux – the loveliest of Satie tunes – left me cold. Rhythms are brittle, melodies are graceless, and although the articulation is formidably clear, I couldn’t find much trace of Satie’s charm and outlandish wit. It’s an intriguingly mechanised, depersonalised and de-emotionalised approach that casts Satie in an uber-modernist vein, but it overstates the irony and sarcasm. With Satie, nothing can ever be so clearcut.
