The 2024 edition of the Festival Ravel closed with two related events featuring Festival Director, pianist Bertrand Chamayou. Behind this first programme lies Chamayou’s discovery of the admiration of avant-garde American John Cage for the music of Erik Satie. “You can trace a direct lineage,” writes Chamayou, from “Satie to Cage’s Dream and In a Landscape, foreshadowing the minimalist movement”. Both Cage pieces were included in the recital, as was the curiously titled All Sides of the Small Stone (for Erik Satie). But then puzzling titles are hardly unknown in Satie, whose compositions played here included his Véritables Préludes flasques pour un chien (Truly flabby Preludes for a dog)! As Chamayou demonstrated, these pieces are not flabby but lean and contrapuntal, harbingers of neo-classicism.
The more familiar Satie was well represented, the Trois Gymnopédies played not as a group, but separated across the programme, presumably to reduce the effect of their similarity. The seven Gnossiennes too were played in short groups. The juxtaposition of different Satie items, and the placing of the three Cage pieces (two of them were eight and nine minutes, more than twice the length of any Satie piece) was not the least reason why this recital, just over 50 minutes long with no interval, held the attention so well.
The “free time” (absence of time signatures and bar-lines) of the Gnossiennes did not seem to give the pianist a problem of interpretation, far from it. In the once ubiquitous Gymnopédies, Chamayou’s limpid playing and subtle nuances caught something essential about these works, the mood of a slow atmospheric dance. Not perhaps too close to the definition of a gymnopédie in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Dictionnaire de musique, of a “dance for naked Spartan maidens” but alluring nonetheless.
There was actual dancing to Chamayou’s playing later in the evening when, after a change of venue to the Centre Culturel in St Jean-de-Luz, the music was all by Cage and his invention, the “prepared piano”. That preparation involves inserting between the piano strings items to alter its sound; nuts, bolts, screws, felt, wool, bits of wood, plastic, rubber, etc. This performance took its title, CAGE², from a stage show, built around twelve such pieces written by Cage between 1940 and 1945, which Chamayou and dancer-choreographer Élodie Sicard have toured around France. For practical purposes, it was necessary to have four pianos, each ‘prepared’ in different ways, on the stage. The power of 2 applied to Cage’s name in the show’s title referred to the complementary presence of two performers, pianist and dancer, and to the square formed by the four pianos, each in a corner of the stage.
The sound of these instruments is transformed. It would be quite possible to overhear the music without realising a modern piano was involved at all. These exciting percussive sounds, often rhythmic with many repetitions, made a primitive rattling cacophony, but with plangent sounds also at moments. Chamayou’s playing, in its virtuosity, commitment and stamina, was remarkable.
The dancing did not quite match that, for Sicard seemed unsure whether her role was to provide an abstract interpretation of the music, or some narrative which the music accompanied. While moving with aesthetic and athletic eloquence in the abstract mode, she was not helped by very gloomy lighting. After a costume change, she acquired an accessory in the form of a powder-blue fluffy item, on a length of cord. This served variously as a hat, a baby to cradle, and eventually a duster to polish Chamayou’s piano, and even his back. Silliness can find a place in art, as we have seen with Satie’s titles, but sometimes it is just silly.
Chamayou closed the Festival with a speech, which included reminding us that 2025 will see the 150th anniversary of Ravel’s birth. Accommodation for Festival Ravel might be at a premium, but worth seeking out.
Roy's press trip was funded by the Festival Ravel
