Search - Satie, White :: Erik Satie: Piano Works

White ,a lifelong fascination with Satie's conceptual beauty

Rachel Abbinanti (tusai1@aol.com) | Chicago | 06/05/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Satie has influenced a entire generation of British composers, those whose body of work has marked an exclusive realm of the piano solo.Howard Skempton,Dave Smith,and the late Cornelius Cardew,all have an impressive body of piano work in concept,in relation to the piano's history,in the quality of sound maintained. John White is a consummately prolific piano craftsman of this school. His lifelong fascination with Satie is forever present in his music,perhaps more Satie's working premise that any image can be transformed into music.White's130 odd piano sonatas engage in a conceptual scope from nearly hour tone-poems to one-idea short miniatures each test a subversive strain Satie would have enjoyed. Satie was the current buzz of the late Sixties,and the market was keen to project this cafe bar pianist's music in just about every genre ,orchestrations,arrangements for flutes,bagpipes,cimbaloms, a motley array of misguided Satie was the result. White in contrast is a Satie schola r(if that can be a genre) since Satie hated the dreaded bureauocracy, and brings a deep-felt insight to his selections.There are no"Gymnopieds" here, bludgeoaned to death by the market,instead White's selections are exclusively early Satie as the one-hand sparse "Leitmotiv du 'Panthee'" from 1891, or the "Sonneries de la Rose Croix" from 1892. Satie was a Rosacrucian,a sect that believed in eating only consummative items that were white in colour. Eggwhites for instance are a current craze. The two "Gnossiennes" here are the two seldom heard, one with the rolling chords forever haunts the imagination. White has been working with the Satie Foundation in France and has uncovered a number of never-heard-before works. Satie died in the Twenties and no one entered his apartment since 1900. What was found was a small mountain of manuscripts from the floor. Look for these works in the future."