Satie: Gymnopédie No. 2

Claire Chevallier plays the music of Erik Satie on a period Erard Piano

Chevallier has gained many plaudits for her recordings with Jos van Immerseel and Anima Eterna, including the BBC Music Magazine Award nominated recording of Ravel’s Piano Concerto for Left Hand.

A genuinely new approach to these popular works.

Claire Chevallier writes in the sleevenote:

Jean Cocteau said of Satie (whom he saw every morning for a long period of his life): ‘He inherited a grave eccentricity from his Scottish ancestry. . . . Egotistical, cruel, obsessive, he would listen to nothing that did not conform to his dogma and would fly into furious rages with anything that disturbed it. Egotistical, because he thought only of his music. Cruel, because he defended his music. Obsessive, because he polished his music. And his music was tender. And so he was, too, in his own way. . . . He cleaned himself with pumice stone. He never used water. At a time when music surged forth in floods, recognising Debussy’s genius but fearful of his despotism (they remained on friendly but quarrelsome terms right up to the end), he turned his back on the latter’s school and became, at the Schola Cantorum, the odd sort of Socrates we knew. ‘There he pumiced, defied, smoothed himself, and forged the little orifice through which his exquisite force needed only to flow from its source.’

When I chanced on this passage from Cocteau shortly after the recording, I felt this text summed up my impressions of those few days in front of the microphones when I had played Satie on my 1905 Érard. This superb piano regulated to cope with high volume and works that ‘surge forth in floods’ (such as Ravel’s Concerto for the left hand, ZZT060901) offered me the rich sonority of a cathedral on legs (especially for Les Sonneries de la Rose+Croix and the Ogives), but thereby showed me what Satie had resisted: it showed me in practice the paradox I required for his music. This paradox nourished each note of an inner universe equivalent to Satie’s egotistical, cruel, obsessive struggle to reach a goal of which he remains the sole master universe were opening up before me. In fact, all this music requires a total reduction of resources, a knifeedge playing style, a refusal of effect, and the most touching thing is that this leads us to Cocteau’s extraordinary conclusion: Satie’s music is tender. But it is a tenderness of an almost indecipherable purity . . .‘Precious’, as Satie would have said . . . Claire Chevallier - 10 May 2008

From the poetry of Debussy to the nostalgia of Ravel, from the humour of Satie to the insouciance of Poulenc, the French music of the early decades of the twentieth century was created by fine minds capable of grasping delicate nuances, infinite variations of light on the natural world and the human soul. From the gentlest im pressionism to the most outrageous surrealism, the pathways of French music are many and varied - and immensely colourful.

Dedicated to the memory of Brigitte Engerer.

Produced by EMI Classics in partnership with the prestigious National Gallery in London, The National Gallery Collection is a budget-price catalogue series bringing together the very best in fine art and classical music.

The collection features a selection of classical masterworks in celebrated recordings from the EMI Classics catalogue, brought together with great artworks from The National Gallery’s permanent collection.

"No more committed or convincing champion of this music could be found than Ciccolini, who equally well conveys, for example, the tenderness of the fifth Gnossienne, the pre-Poulenc pert humour and charm of the Morceaux en forme de poire and the frenetic gaiety of the ‘Grande ritournelle’ of La Belle excentrique." Gramophone Magazine

EMI MASTERS celebrates the full glory of the greatest performances from the world's greatest catalogue of recorded music. Digitally remastered at Abbey Road Studios direct from the original master tapes, these classic recordings emerge with unparalleled immediacy. You will be left in no doubt that you are in the presence of legendary musicians and ageless interpretations.

The long-awaited new disc from the 12 Cellists of the Berliner Philharmoniker takes us on a journey of discovery through the musical landscape of France. In music spanning the best part of a century and covering several genres, the all-cello ensemble sings its way into our hearts, leaving us with “an inimitably French scent of nostalgia.”

“We have long wanted to make a CD purely of French music,” the 12 Cellists write in an introductory note: “France produced many of the greatest cellists, including Pierre Fournier, Maurice Gendron and Paul Tortelier. In fact, the ensemble came into being some 35 years ago, when Jean Français wrote his Aubade especially for the 12 Cellists. When we were looking for music for our new CD, we found lots of pieces that - even if they hadn’t been originally written for our instrumental combination - were wonderfully suited to the sound of 12 cellos.”

The central work on this recording is Poulenc’s most original choral score La figure humaine, composed in 1943 for two unaccompanied choirs of six voices each. Although rarely heard in the original setting, La figure humaine, based on eight poems by Paul Éluard, is perfectly suited to performance by The 12 Cellists. Over a span of nearly 20 minutes, it brings to mind, in turn, plainchant, organ textures, a Baroque dance, bits of popular melodies and resemblances to the work of Debussy and Ravel. The final poem is Liberté, which was dropped over German-occupied France during the War by the RAF and which has been described as a hymn to freedom from German-occupied France.

Other album tracks include arrangements of Fauré’s Pavane, Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte, Debussy’s Clair de lune and Satie’s Gymnopédies Nos. 1 & 2. From the sphere of popular song come Edit Piaf’s signature tune La vie en rose, two Michel Legrand numbers, The summer knows and Une femme est une femme and Fleur de Paris by Henri Bourtayre, made famous by Maurice Chevalier. Sous les ponts de Paris by the prolific Marseille composer Vincent Scotto evokes a stroll along the Seine while Hubert Giraud’s Sous le ciel de Paris is a familiar melody to many of us, even if we don’t know where we know it from.

The 12 Cellists of the Berliner Philharmoniker, an orchestra within an orchestra, was formed in 1974 during the tenure of Herbert von Karajan. The ensemble counts as its godfathers Pablo Casals and Julius Klengel, a performance of whose Hymn for Twelve Cellos was their original raison d'être. In the intervening years, they have augmented their repertoire through commissions and arrangements in a wide variety of styles performed with guest artists on trumpet, clarinet, percussion, harp, double bass and more, drawn from different musical disciplines. Popular performers in concert halls around the world, the 12 Cellists of the Berliner Philharmoniker undertake regular tours both in tandem with the Orchestra and on their own. In the coming months, they will perform in Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands and on a tour of Asia.

This is the 12 Cellists’ fifth recording for EMI Classics. Their previous releases were Angel Voices, music with sacred roots composed between the 16th and 21st centuries, As Time Goes By, mostly arrangements of film music, Round Midnight, a programme of classic Broadway songs, film themes, spirituals and jazz, and South American Getaway, featuring Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasilieras Nos. 1 & 5 and tangos by Astor Piazzolla, among others.