Forget the spaced out photo of Thibaudet on the cover, the meaningless title (“The Magic of Satie”), or the flipside tray card photo in which the pianist has his hands covering his eyes in imitation of a Jewish housewife lighting Shabbat candles on a Friday night. With so many Satie recitals indulging extremes of slowness–and dullness–in an attempt to impose on the music a spurious “spirituality”, Thibaudet remains true to form and offers a predominantly lively program (including some first recordings) built around intelligently spaced islands of relaxation. Thank heavens!
Of course, no Satie program would be complete without his most famous work, the three pieces that he called Gymnopédie, and which became famous in the U.S. as the musical background to commercials for the patent medicine Geritol. Happily, Thibaudet plays them with a light touch, a minimum of fuss, a few deftly applied touches of rubato in the right places (between the phrases, not in the middle of them), and aptly flowing tempos. Just what the doctor ordered! Best of all, the three pieces aren’t played one after the other so as to become an exercise in tedium; rather, the first comes on track 1 and the rest are interspersed with livelier fare, and this allows each to register most effectively. After the first Gymnopédie, Thibaudet presents all seven Gnossiennes (brought together for the first time) in a skillfully characterized little suite.
The remainder of the program largely explores Satie’s toccata-like, busier side, and Thibaudet excels at this sort of music. He has a great time with the tacky waltz Je te veux and brings a maximum of brilliance and brittle wit to Jack in the Box, the Sonatine bureaucratique, and the Cinq Grimaces for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. There also are some interesting and hitherto little-known pieces (except to specialists): The Dreamy Fish, L’Enfance de Ko-Quo, and The Angora Ox, all of which sound wholly characteristic of the composer and receive equally sympathetic interpretations.
My one quibble with this release concerns the recording, which picks up the swoosh of what must be the piano’s dampers moving when Thibaudet uses the pedals. There is no excuse for putting a microphone so close to the instrument, a practice that also produces a hardness of tone at full volume. Still, there’s not a lot of pounding going on here: Satie’s not that kind of composer, and you’ll be hard pressed to find a recital more in sync with the composer’s peculiar sound world, or more engagingly planned.
