Yang Honors Satie with Guitar Arrangements

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page) 

Thanks to the Dynamite Guitars series, I have taken a great interest in guitarist Xuefei Yang. Her last visit took place this past February at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, following up on her visit in March of 2023, when she performed selections from her Guitar Favorites album. This past Friday saw the release of her latest album, Chapeau Satie; and, as might be guessed from the title, it consists entirely of arrangements of compositions by Erik Satie.

Most of Satie’s music was composed for solo piano. Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, and Francis Poulenc were all influenced by his efforts, while his earliest champion in the United States was probably John Cage. Ironically, my most recent encounter with his music in performance had nothing to do with keyboard instruments. Rather, it took place during lutenist Thomas Dunford’s recital at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church this past March, when he included arrangements of selections from both the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes series.

This coming Tuesday, July 1, will mark the centennial of Satie’s death. Yang recorded Chapeau Satie to honor that occasion. The album offers a rich diversity of not only Satie’s piano works but also a generous serving of his art songs. The vocalist for those selections is soprano Héloise Werner. There are also arrangements of the three Gymnopédies compositions for guitar and flute, transcribed jointly by Yang and flutist Sharon Bezaly.

Ironically, if my archives are correct, I have not encountered a solo piano performance of Satie’s music since Hélène Grimaud’s visit to Davies Symphony Hall in January of 2022. Mind you, all of my “academic” encounters with Satie (graduate and well as undergraduate) involved professors whose opinions ran the gamut from perplexed to dismissive. If Satie’s ghost hovered over any of those classrooms, I suspect that he would have responded to that treatment with a sly grin.

One might almost suggest that Satie was more concerned with being French than with being acknowledged as a composer. Ironically, when I think about his personality, I am reminded of one of my favorite passages from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Yang’s approaches to Satie seem to acknowledge those “multitudes” while finding a way to present them without overwhelming the attentive listener.