If you’re an Erik Satie fan, you’ve probably come across his three preludes to Pèladan’s drama Le fils des étoiles–typically strange, stark, and oddly moving chord-based pieces. Satie’s complete accompaniment music for each of the play’s three acts also exists in manuscript form, and it’s recorded here, I believe, for the first time. Basically the preludes repeat and repeat, and repeat and repeat, and repeat and repeat, with little if any mutation along the way. Toward the end of Act 1, Satie throws in his Third Gnossienne for good measure.
Steffen Schleiermacher plays this music slowly, almost too seriously, and with all the reverence and lack of artifice you get from, say, Rudolf Serkin’s Beethoven. Before you know it, the pianist’s concentration and control work themselves into your bloodstream, and you’re hooked for 80 minutes. It doesn’t matter if you listen all the way through, or simply treat the experience as wallpaper music to accompany your household cleaning, bedtime reading, or preparing your tax returns. Then play this disc in repeat mode and see if anyone notices. What a quietly audacious way to launch a Satie cycle!
