ITM 1424
Quatre Preludes
Petite Ouverture à danser
Danses gothiques
54:20

ITM 1451
Trois Gymnopédies
Pages mystiques
Sonneries de la rose et croix
Ogives
Piéces froides - Trois airs à faire fuir
Piéces froides - Trois danses de travers
two CD's, 48:07, 47:20

Fanfare July/Aug 92, Art Lange:

I believe it was 1986. I was editor of Down Beat magazine. We'd get stacks of LPs and CDs into the office daily. One LP, from Nato, a French label specializing in avant-garde European jazz and odd miscellaneous items, caught my eye: Ulrich Gumpert, a (then) East German "free jazz" pianist playing Erik Satie's Sarabandes and Gnossiennes. Though there was little chance I'd assign it for review, I was curious. I listened to it. And I was mesmerized. These were interpretations of serious contemplation and inspiration, but the tempos were…perverse. Consider the first Gnossienne (marked, in the score, "With absolutely unchanging rhythm throughout, monotonous and white," but without tempo indication.) Aldo Ciccolini, in his esteemed earlier of two traversals of Satie's piano oeuvre, plays it in 3:22. On the other end of the spectrum in Reinbert de Leeuw (John Wiser in Fanfare branded him "eccentric-unto-madness"), who takes approximately six minutes. Gumpert clocks in at 7:09. For all three Sarabandes, Ciccolini in his version 2 takes a leisurely 16:53. Gumpert, who allows Satie's stark chords to hover in the air, ecstatically, 27:21.

Gumpert's Nato recording has not yet, to my knowledge, been released on CD. But here we have three new discs devoted to the remainder of Satie's "major" piano works pre-1900. The date is important, since it marks Satie's period of most original and mystical composing, including the time he spent under the Rosicrucians, long before he returned to the Schola Cantorum, at age forty, to "re-learn" the art of composition, long before he wrote the humorous, Dadaesque works which are his most popular. And, once again, Gumpert's timings are, to say the least, expansive. In the best-known music here, the Gymnopédies, there's little difference between Ciccolini's two versions; both are stately, proper, around eight minutes total. Gumpert is almost exactly twice as long in each of the three. In fact, the only performances I've ever heard comparable to Gumpert's deliberate tempos were by Fritz Reiner conducting the Chicago Symphony, where the gradually revealed textures were dazzling, like the completely calm, glittering landscape after an ice storm. But Reiner had orchestral colors to add interest; Gumpert is hard pressed to convince us of his approach in the Gymnopédies because they are so familiar to us, the melodies sound disjointed.

But elsewhere, Gumpert's interpretations are revelatory. In the enigmatic Danses Gothiques and the intensely chordal Sonneries, where static, minimal material is framed by silences and patterns and symmetrical figures are repeated, Gumpert shows us just exactly how Satie is spiritual father to Morton Feldman. You'll notice I've not called any of Gumpert's performances "slow," because speed isn't really the issue; pace, pulse, and temperament are at the heart of his radical vision, and he's able to articulate the music convincingly. In the Sonneries, for example, Ciccolini clips his chords to keep things moving, and the results sound glib compared to Gumpert's luxurious breadth of phrasing. Similarly, in the Ogives
Gumpert cushions the chords, and finds in their labyrinthine logic a pilgrimage of faith.

I suspect these performances will not be to everyone's taste. Even at Ciccolini's conventional tempos John Wiser called the severely limited rhythmic and harmonic progressions "numbing." In Gumpert's extreme vision, I find them enlightening. Many people still dismiss Satie as a charlatan or simpleton or oddball poseur, but Gumpert takes him seriously, and in exaggerating those elements which Satie's detractors find hardest to accept finds something profound and beautiful.