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Rogé around the time of the first album. Surprised? How could someone who looks this young make music that sounds so mature? |
From 1996 Penguin Guide:
(1983 CD) Rogé has real feeling for this music and conveys its
bitter-sweet quality and its grave melancholy as well as he does its lighter
qualities. He produces, as usual, consistent beauty of tone, and this is
well projected by the recording. Very well recorded, this remains the primary
recommendation on CD for this repertoire, together with its companion (below).
Fanfare, July/Aug 85, J.D.W:
Erik Satie's deceptively simple-textured music attracts pianists
of two distinct varieties, conspicuously sophisticated and conspicuously
not. The latter group includes those who regard themselves as upwardly
mobile from various pop non-disciplines.
Pascal Rogé, with a sizable discography of French piano music to
his credit, is in the former group. He may even be too sophisticated for
his own effectiveness in dealing with Satie. Rogé, who commands
a full and finely adjustable range of tone and color, restricts himself
to a soft-voiced and leisurely manner, so leisurely that the Gymnopédies,
which can't reasonably be made to move at any great extremes of tempo,
come to a near halt.
At that, Rogé has a long way to go to beat the all-time slow tempo
record for the Gymnopédies, Reinbert de Leeuw's beautifully
voiced by absolutely static reading once available on Teldec. De Leeuw,
for the stopwatch-oriented, took an astounding 16 minutes to traverse the
three: Rogé is hardly in that league at 8:13.
For nearly all the rest, this approach is consistent and convincing, lyrical
and unquestionably beautiful. The major exception is the Sonatine bureaucratique,
whose bitingly satirical thrust demands a manner as hard-edged as Ciccolini
to make it acid point tellingly. The café-concert stuff, Le Piccadilly
and Je te Veux, is likewise happier-sounding with less finesse and
more barrelhousing.
Those who have found Aldo Ciccolini's percussive manner wearisome in this
music may find Rogé's views of the Master of Arceuil a welcome change
… or perhaps merely a different aspect of wearisomeness.
From 1996 Penguin Guide:
(1989 CD) Pascal Rogé's choice of repertoire on this well-filled
disc ranges from the Rose-Croix pieces through the Nocturnes. As
with the earlier recital, his playing has an eloquence and charm that are
altogether special, and the recorded sound is very good indeed.
American Record Guide, Jul/Aug 90,
Arved Ashby:
(comparing Rogé 2nd CD to Francis Clidat)
THE INTERPRETIVE STANCES OF THESE TWO French pianists are perfectly contrasted:
Rogé is eager to seek out beautiful, impressionistic realms beneath
the humble exteriors, while Clidat presents little in the way of interpretive
embellishment. The former cultivates a rich sonority in a pleasantly wet
acoustic, while the latter is simple, clear, and a little dry in sound.
Rogé seizes upon Satie's lyric gifts and lusher harmonies, while
Clidat creates a wide dynamic range and likes to keep the listener from
settling too far back into his easy chair.
Fanfare, Nov/Dec 89 (90?), William
Zagorski:
(reviews 2nd CD, compares with Alan
Marks)
Pascal Rogé, in his collection (its greater variety of pieces notwithstanding);
applies musical insight, a formidable, but always elegant pianistic technique,
and an abundance of wit (where called for). In his capable hands Satie
emerges as the epigrammatic, aphoristic, and ingeniously colorful composer
that he is. Poudre d'or has some of the flavor of the French dance
hall. Pièces froides - Trois airs à faire fuir is
meditative without being stultifying. The comparison here with Marks, who
plays two of these pieces, is stunning. And so it goes through the rest
of this collection. Pascal Rogé has his hands on the nerve centers
of this music, and delivers performances that are comparable to those of
Aldo Ciccolini (I find he surpasses this formidable pianist here and there),
and to those few recordings of this literature by William
Masselos, who brought a similar wit, expressive nuance, and verve to
this oeuvre.
Rogé's piano has been recorded at a slightly greater distance than
I've found in recent modern piano recordings. Here, I feel this perspective
works admirably, allowing Rogé to accentuate the contrasts in weight,
sonority, and the often delicate colors of these pieces. Here, I feel,
the contrasts were more in Rogé's hands than in those of the engineers.
Satie has been well served.
Recommendation in Good CD Guide
Washingtonian, June 89
Welcome back, Satie. Aldo Ciccolini's definitive account so the
nutty and mysterious works for piano have been reissued by Angel. But there's
a new pianist, a young Frenchman named Pascal Rogé, who is bringing
a new clarity and a new grace to this eccentric music.
The greater part of Satie's output was for the piano, in part because he
had the temperament of a miniaturist. He was obsessed with the repetition
of small phrases, which he would make subtle and compulsive variations
on; and he broke ground in the uses of silence. His music has a strange
way of making you hear how much is not there. It has a naïve
quality, not altogether fake, a bit too cute, finally too civilized to
persuade. His sort of simplicity comes at the end of a tradition, not at
the beginning.
The music mixes the concert hall and the café (Satie played piano
in Montmarte for a living) in a way that we might call post-modern: Elements
are joined together to give an impression of late-in-the-day irony. In
Satie's case, the irony is sometimes also absurdity, heightened by the
composer's wonderful titles for his pieces - "Three Truly Flabby Preludes
(for a dog)" for example, or "Sketches and Exasperations of a
Big Wooden Fellow." But thankfully the mischief fails to disguise
the refinement beneath. Satie's harmonies are ravishing, and quietly, unmistakably
his. Rogé captures the remote wit and crystalline beauty of these
pieces. The very sound of diffidence.
Gramophone
May 89, Lionel Salter:
Compares Rogé's 2nd CD, Queffélec's
1st CD, old De Leeuw CD-repackage
of LPs
Satie seems to be definitely Flavor of the Month; and it is intriquing
to think of the two French pianists here, Rogé in Paris and Queffélec
in a church near Newbury, recording him at precisely the same time. Listening
to this extensive coverage of Satie's confections, it becomes evident that
behind the eccentric blagueur who plastered his scores with silly
surrealist comments, incorporated parodies of Mozart, Chabrier and Chopin's
funeral march (typically acknowledged as "Schubert's celebrated mazurka")
and quoted numerous nursery tunes, there lurked an innovator whose adoption
of brevity, austere texture and plainsong-like archaisms fathered a reaction
against the expansiveness and plush color of the romantics, an experimenter
who was using exotic scales, block triads and unresolved chords of the
ninth before Debussy, a polytonalist ahead of his time, and - more importantly
- a composer with a vein of fantasy (even though deficient in rhythmic
variety.)
Three of his earliest piano collections (from the late 1880s), presented
by Reinbert de Leeuw, conscientiously illustrate his initial efforts but,
frankly, make for a wearisome disc, containing as it does a succession
of pieces not only all very slow in themselves, but played at a snail's
pace, some below my metronome's minimum marking and in places with two
seconds between adjacent crotchets): the total effect is not so much somnambulistic
as cataleptic. Queffélec's program, drawn from the 1912-17 period
plus the familiar Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes and
a couple of transcriptions of music-hall songs, is far better planned for
diversity and pleasurable listening, and is performed with commitment,
tonal sensitivity and great finesse in rubato. Taking the opposite approach
from the Buster Keaton-ish deadpan delivery of Yuji
Takahashi, she brings a bubbling gaiety to Sonatine bureaucratique
, energy to "La chasse" in Sports et Divertissements (in which
""Le piquenique" points forward to Poulnec, and the fourths
of "Le tango" anticipate Milhaud's Saudades do Brasil),
swagger to the Piccadilly cakewalk and a delicious lightness to the first
of the Embryons desséches with their childish reiteration
of final chords. (I understand Satie's quotations of La Marseillaise
in "Les courses" - following Debussy's example in his Feux
d'artifice - but could some expert explain what the bon roi Dagobert
was doing at the battle of Cimbres?)
Rogé's net is cast wider, from the hieratic Prélude de
"La porte héroïque du ciel" of 1894 to the rarefied
Nocturnes of 1919 (all but No. 4, which he included in his first
Satie CD.) In these late pieces, more serious and substantial in content
than many of the inconsequential miniatures that had gone before, there
are glimpses of Fauré's influence, to which Rogé's coolly
elegant poise is well suited; and there is a notable purity in his cantabile
in the second of the Pièces froides - Trois airs à faire
fuir. Elsewhere the acoustics of the Salle Wagram create some roughness
of sound (as in the last of the "Jaded dandy's" three waltzes)
and in Poudre d'or, an impression of over-pedaling. It is instructive
to compare Rogés rather routine playing of this café-concert
song with Queffélec beguilingly tender and lilting Je te veux;
and when both pianists offer the same piece there are sometimes greater
differences in interpretation than might be expected from this often naïve
music. There is a quite distinct divergence over articulation in the "Carrier
of big stones" in the Chapitres tournés en tous sens,
and much more vivid excitement in Queffélec's "Chattering woman"
in the same set (Rogé is altogether too polite); and in the passionate
"Reprimand" of the Véritables préludes flasques
she also shows more character. Her playing is very cleanly but warmly recorded.
There isn't really a question of choosing between these two disc, since
the programs to not overlap too much, but I have to say I enjoyed the Virgin
Classics issue <Queffélec> the most.
From the 1996 Rough
Guide :
Pascal Rogé's two recordings of Satie piano music perfectly
capture the composer's mixture of knowingness and näivety, drawing
you into this unique sound world in performances that are full of elegant
poise. Rogé is just as successful at bringing out the underlying
melancholy of a set like the six Gnossiennes as he is at catching the sharp
wit of a collection like Veritables preludes flasques. If you want
to pick just one CD as a sampler of Satie's music, go for the collection
featuring the Gnoissiennes and Gymnopédies.
American
Record Guide, Sep-Oct 1996, Alexander Morin:
This disc is called After the Rain: The Soft Sounds of Erik Satie,
presumably in an effort to attract listeners seeking wallpaper music that
will not disturb their somnolence. It does have something of that quality,
especially if taken in one gulp, but the careful listener to individual
pieces will be rewarded by their simple and unaffected beauty. It is hard
for us now to imagine how startling they must have seemed to Paris audiences
accustomed to the lush music of Franck and Saint-Saens, especially when
accompanied by the composer's bizarre titles and performance instructions,
but they are still unlike anything else in the piano literature and still
full of touching and evocative charm.
On the page, the music looks as though it should be easy to play, and
in fact it makes few demands on the interpreter who simply wants to produce
the notes as written. But getting at the spirit of this material without
exaggeration or sentimentality is not at all an easy task. Pascal Roge
does it very well, in this compilation from his complete set of Satie's
piano music, recorded in 1984 and 1989. It includes the most familiar pieces
- Gymnopédies, Gnossiennes, and the Nocturnes
- along with a number of less known works, all played with sensitivity,
a tasteful rubato, and a luminous tone.
Review Grade: A
Fanfare, Nov/Dec 96,Bernard
Jacobson:
(reviews After the Rain… )
While deploring the current unavailability of William
Masselos classic Satie recordings <actually, available from BMG>
John W. Lambert <Nov/Dec 94 review of McCabe, Kasperson> bracketed
Pascal Rogé's performances alongside Aldo Ciccolini's Angel recordings
among the best modern versions of Satie's teasing and fascinating piano
pieces. A liberal selection of them has now been culled from two previous
releases and gathered together on this CD, which includes most of the "essential"
pieces and sounds quite beautiful.
I fully concur with Lambert's judgment. However much Klára
Körmendi's Naxos series (which I haven't heard) may have modified
the picture, Rogé's handling of the music can surely stand comparison
with anyone's. He has a way of ever so slightly spreading left-hand chords
that is somehow never annoying. On the contrary, it seems to bring out
the seriousness that underlies the persistent frivolity of the composer's
verbal directions. It is not that Rogé tries to turn this determinedly
unsentimental music into something romantic. That would be self-defeating.
The effect is rather to make this listener, at least more conscious than
usual for the existential loneliness that shaped the outwardly sociable
Satie and dominated his inner life. Except in one very considerable masterpiece
- Socrate - the "bon maître d'Arcueil" was perhaps
a fairly petit maître; but his gift, if a limited one, was also utterly
real, honest, and individual, and his way of ritualizing emotion serves
as a compelling halfway house between the dry manner of Rossini's Péchés
de viellesse and Stravinsky's related penchant for ritual as a mediating
and distancing factor in expression.
<complains about the "new age" presentation of this CD>
Comments from discussion
group:
Regarding Sonatine bureaucratique: It is performed by a number of
pianists. I recommend Pascal Rogé. NF
PASCAL ROGÉ is tops!!! His two recordings on the Decca-label are
fantastic. No one has been able to grasp the unwritten rhythm of the "Gnossiennes"
better than he has. No one else makes the "Pieces Froides" cause
such a thrill, and the "Gymnopedies" simply lift you off the
ground! It seems to me that many (minor-gifted) pianists have been unable
to really get 'into' the Satie-spirit. Performing Satie is indeed a hard
task. Can I say many of his piano- works are so hypnotizing, that they
are almost AUTISTIC...? Does anyone have ideas on this?
Try Pascal Roge on Decca <London>, a most enjoyable selection
of Satie piano miniatures
I have the Glazer VoxBox also; It's pleasant, although I prefer the recording
by Pascal Roge. The Roge disk contains 70+ min. of Satie's better known
piano works.
Satie gave strange titles to most of his works, so don't be turned off
by the CD name. Rogé does well by Satie. Ciccolini, on EMI, has
issued many volumes of his works. There is a budget priced 2-fer that would
also be a good start.
I also recommend Pascal Roge's first album from 1983, "3 Gymnopedies & other piano works" (Decca Records). His second was unfortunately a disappointment.
My favorite is for sure Rascal Roge's interpretations, sensitive but
not too serious. (email from Michael F.)
Rogè and Dickinson are journeyman-like to my ears.
-DP
For sheer beauty of tone, Pascal Roge's second London disk is tough to
beat; he seems to take those gnomic little instructions to heart better
than anyone I've heard.
-TN
Roge rides the piano like a roller-coaster with a parachute.
-TCY
