Many years after Erik Satie’s death in 1925, friends gained access to his small and cluttered apartment where they found two grand pianos stacked on top of each other, a chair, a table, seven velvet suits, and hoards of unsent love letters. An apparently eccentric man, Satie lived a life of contradictions: he was an introvert but a compelling performer; he lived in squalor but dressed immaculately in velvet; he was branded a ‘worthless’ pianist by his conservatoire professor, and yet he composed some of the most strikingly beautiful piano music of the twentieth-century. Satie’s mysterious life has long since provided fascination for historians and musicians, and now, notably, our very own Elena Kats-Chernin (composer) and Tamara Anna Cislowska (pianist).

I raved about Kats-Chernin and Cislowska’s fine artistic partnership back in May 2016, following the release of their album Butterflying. Their latest project – a collection of twenty-six piano miniatures inspired by Satie’s unsent love letters – is equally outstanding. Each piece reflects some element of Satie: a line from a letter to his lover Suzanne Valadon, a segment of a composition, or an anecdote pertaining to his eccentricity. Kats-Chernin previously demonstrated her talent for interpretation in her 2004 Re-Inventions based on the music of J.S. Bach, but I think her style lends itself even more fully to Satie’s work. Their respective compositions are similar for their hypnotism, simplicity and creeping melancholy. Cislowska brings the Kats-Chernin/Satie amalgam to life with the same brilliance she displayed in Butterflying. She summons the ominous rise and decay of a funeral bell in the closing ‘for whom it tolls’, and elicits the excitement of young love in the opening ‘love token’. Unsent Love Letters is a triumph for Kats-Chernin and Cislowska, and a great tribute to the tender and exquisite music of Satie.

Alexandra Mathew