When Erik Satie’s friends entered his apartment after the composer died in 1925, they were shocked by the chaos they found there. Not only did the debris include a huge collection of umbrellas, but two grand pianos, piled one on top of the other. The musical equivalent of the image of those instruments, the sound of one keyboard dubbed on to a recording of another, was the starting point for pianist and harpsichordist Tamar Halperin’s 150th-birthday tribute to Satie. It is, she says, an attempt to reflect the ways in which Satie’s music connected with and influenced so many different areas of 20th-century culture, and how it blurred the boundaries between musical styles, classical and popular.
Halperin is best known as an accompanist, especially in recitals with her husband, countertenor Andreas Scholl. Here she plays Hammond organ, Wurlitzer electric piano and glockenspiel, as well as her usual piano and harpsichord, with a recording engineer adding electronic washes and synthesiser to some of the tracks. Her choice of Satie’s miniatures centres on the well-known sets of Gymnopèdies and Gnossiennes, with a few less familiar pieces thrown into the mix, such as the Trois Morceaux en Forme de Poire, and extracts from the Danses de Travers.
The results are mixed, sometimes whimsically unpredictable. Halperin plays some of the pieces, such as the opening Son Binocle, from Les Trois Valses Distinguées du Précieux Dégouté, perfectly normally, if with a rather bright, forward piano sound, while the haloes and doublings she adds to many of the others are unobtrusively tasteful and subtle. But just occasionally her treatments topple over into kitsch, and their contrivances cheapen Satie’s guileless melodies. The sleeve notes, in which Halperin details the associations that each of the pieces conjures up for her, won’t be to all tastes either: in the fifth Gnossienne, for instance, she imagines “a late-night crowd, smoking and drinking away, while a piano melody spins languidly around them, lingering like the aftertaste of a sweet dream”. I’m not sure we really need to know that, but it’s a pleasant enough disc all the same.
