American Record Guide Nov-Dec 1995, Charles Berigan:

If memory serves, in one of his varied tomes of reminiscence of life, love, semi-licentiousness, and music, Ned Rorem talks about many a Paris salon gathering where, in what is commonly known as "the shank of the evening", one after another young aspiring virtuoso would sit down to perform his or her latest knuckle-busting extravaganza, only to be trumped at last with rich irony and no little poise by some well-placed Satie, served up by the young Aldo Ciccolini. How Satie would have loved such a scene of posthumous vindication and celebration of his talent. How fitting also, that a player of such sophistication and technical ability would have such a calling for this repertory. For youth and musicality are really not enough, as witness this disc.

Mauro Masala is a young player of some skill and budding musical sensibility, but I miss the edge, the appreciation of just what this music was rebelling against. More than a dash of almost vaudevillian raffishness, with roots in the Rue Pigalle rather than the Conservatoire would not be out of place. Masala smooths it all out rather self-consciously. The fast pieces lumber along without real style, and Masala doesn't seem to know what to do when confronted with the regularity and even monotony of some of the lyrical lines and accompanimental figures. The answer is, as Pablo Casals would say, "Play frankly". It is perfectly acceptable here not to play with conventional notions of rubato and "romantic" expressivity. The intentionally mechanical, even crude nature of much of this work is really what it's all about. This is after all the man who held his own in artistic collaboration with the likes of Picasso and Cocteau, maintained cabaret jobs in dingy nightclubs, and was above all else a fiercely independent soul. Masala has not really entered the world of the composer or his music.

Fanfare July/Aug 95 John W. Lambert:

Because I have recently been called upon to review four CDs containing music by Satie, I have begun to think that I am perhaps the (temporary) King of the Hill vis-a-vis this delightful composer of whimsically titled works. Concurrently, I am troubled about all the frivolity, for we critics tend to take Satie far more seriously than one suspects he took himself (which makes one wonder how to reconcile all this with Fanfare's moniker: "The Magazine for Serious Record Collectors". Every now and then, one encounters a performer who takes Satie too seriously as well. Masala is such a player: his readings here preserved are altogether funereal in terms of pacing - he takes about twelve and a half minutes to plod through the Gymnopédies, whereas most tolerably animated pianists manage to dispatch them in well under a third less time. Slow is not necessarily bad, of course, unless the music tends to collapse through lack of cohesiveness - which happens here. Masala takes a similarly laid-back approach to the Sarabandes; mercifully, his interpretations of the other works on this CD are somewhat more lively, but the bottom line is that, despite attractive recorded piano sound, this is one to skip.

In our recent spate of Satie CDs, all the works here recorded have been reviewed except the second Sarabande and Quatre Préludes flasques… (which should not be confused with the Trois Véritables Préludes flasques …) (God bless Satie and his titles!) These should be sought elsewhere to avoid having to invest in this CD simply for the sake of obtaining them.