High Performance Revue, Spring 92, Bert Wechsler:

Sound is perfectly acceptable … This is not a bad recording, if a little leaden .. The music is delightful: I just wish the pianists would lighten up.


American Record Guide May/June 96, Morin:
Trois Morceaux en forme de poire, En Habit de cheval, Parade, Apercus désagréables, Trois petites pièces montées, La belle excentrique

Erik Satie (1866-1925) remains a curious figure in musical annals; a technically deficient composer of limited output, he was at least as influential as Debussy or Stravinsky in clearing away the mists of Wagner and German romanticism and setting the stage for a new aesthetic. His witty and ironic efforts pour épater les bourgeois; his association with avant-garde figures like Diaghilev, Cocteau, and Picasso; his receptivity to new movements like Dadism and Surrealism - all this as much as his music made him a seminal figure in the early years of the 20th Century. Not that his music is trivial; his mixture of medievalism and the music hall, his thin textures and concern for timbres, and his unsentimental and unaffected simplicity resulted in works of inventive charm, wit, and enduring appeal.

This disc contains everything Satie wrote for piano 4-hand; Trois Morceaux en forme de poire and En Habit de cheval are familiar, the rest less so and less interesting. Unfortunately, the Canadian duo-pianists don't do much with any of these pieces. This is music that calls for panache, but their performances are pedestrian and lifeless, their tempos metronomic, and they often sound labored and out of unison. The only alternative currently available on CD is an old recording of Trois Morceaux by Robert and Gaby Casadesus; it is very good; for the rest, we will have to wait until something better comes along. 44 minutes.

Fanfare Jan/Feb 96, William Zagorski:

These are moody, quirky, often unsettling, but compelling readings. At first I was tempted to include the word "grim" in this list, but was dissuaded time and time again by a felicitous and dogged precision, allowing Satie's voice to emerge cumulatively and quite on its own. Their reading of his piano-four-hand reduction of Parade eliminates the "Choral" (whether this was a decision on the part of the performing artists or on that of Satie, I do not know) Their performance of "Petite Fille Américaine," a.k.a. "Ragtime" in most two-hand versions, is measured and inexorable, the antithesis of Joanna MacGregor's vervy account on Collins Classics. Having known Parade only in its orchestral guise, I find Satie's spikey piano sonorities and the effect of the siren, lottery wheel, water puddles, typewriter, and revolver in that leaner context pleasantly clarifying. The result is considerably more surrealistic in effect than is its orchestral predecessor.

True to form, the Duo Campion-Vachon's performance of Apercus désagréables is completely unmannered and comes across most disagreeably. The "Pastorale," Choral," an "Fugue" are at once forbidding and musically satisfying in their austerity.

Trois Morceaux en forme de poire was composed as a piano duet in 1903 and is discographically a comparative rarity. Its trois morceaux apparently comprise seven sections (including number 7 entitled "Repetition"). The opening "Way of Beginning" is largely a transposition of Gnossienne No. 7 of 1897. Satie adds a slow and dispiriting introduction and exploits the wider dynamic range of four hands over two, transforming the dreaminess of Gnossienne No. 7 into something considerably more portentous and nightmarish. The second section, "Prolongation Thereof," is a blustery and harmonically unstable march that ushers in movements I, II, and III, whose affective discourse veers from salon fluff to floating dreaminess, to rage. The three movements are played attaca. "Morover" is a study in haunting minimalism, and "Repetition" at once reprises nothing and everything, providing a one-minute-and-twenty-five-second distillate of the score's more ruminative moods.

En Habit de cheval (1911) reflects Satie's counterpoint studies with Roussel, and his disaffection over the whole enterprise. They are as hard-edged and stark as anything in his oeuvre - Satie manages to stifle his prodigious humanism to an alarming degree.

Trois petites pièces montées and La belle excentrique are from 1921, making them contemporary with Le Peige de Méduse - Satie at his most playful and rarefied. La belle excentrique was composed as a number for the eccentric dancer Caryanthis in his ballroom/ragtime style. I know the piece from piano two-hands versions by Ciccolini and Armengaud. I am not familiar with its orchestral version. As in the opening section of Trois Morceaux en forme de poire, the work benefits from the added sonority of the second pair of hands. Duo Campion-Vachon gives a bracing and rhythmically deft account of the piece.

The recording is clear and impactful, capturing each register of the piano cleanly and in balance. The performances are crisp, clean, and distinguished by fine ensemble throughout.