CCMusic.com

With Erik Satie, the connection between the beguilingly simple music and the sometimes very strange titles remains enigmatic: What is one to imagine by "Withered Embryos", "Penultimate Thoughts" or "Automatic Descriptions"? Steffen Schleiermacher does not even attempt an interpretation. In what is now the 8th installment of his Satie recording, he let's the associations work that the title, texts and playing instructions trigger. The result is music of that captivating clarity that Satie's avant-garde contemporaries admired so much in the eccentric maverick. The "cycles" collected here are mostly in three parts and all of them are surprisingly short, some move only in the five-tone range and seem to be almost children's pieces... And sometimes Satie borrows from deceased colleagues - and misleads both pianist and audience again: The motif of the "famous mazurka by Schubert" is - of course - neither by Schubert, nor is it a mazurka... "Sports et Divertissements" is completely out of the ordinary: Satie composed the total of 22 miniatures on commission as musical accompaniment to a collection of copperplate engravings by a famous fashion illustrator of his time. The pictures illustrate the leisure pleasures of the better-off, from tennis to sailing, and indeed one finds many a correspondence in the music - not without the usual eye-twinkling: the collection opens with an "unappetizing chorale"... For all the supposed simplicity of the music, Satie's manuscripts are true masterpieces of calligraphy, which, together with the curious playing instructions ("without blushing of the finger" - "from the tip of the eyes and held back in advance"), do not pass an artist like Steffen Schleiermacher by without leaving a trace. Incidentally, Satie expressly forbade the reading aloud of his bizarre texts - under threat of legal consequences