Germaine Tailleferre (1892–1983): Chansons du Folklore de France A subtle use of accent instruments (such as the clock-like percussion blocks in Daphéneo and the harp figures in Les Anges) keeps the music buoyant. Caby employed winds and strings (as does Blackwood) to expand upon, yet respect, the brisk simplicity of the original piano accompaniments. For the remainder of his own life, Caby kept fresh his devotion through the editing and orchestration of Satie’s works and by contributing numerous articles to music journals. A former classmate of Jean-Paul Sartre, Caby knew Satie for little more than year, but became a close friend who devotedly visited the elder composer at Paris’s Saint-Joseph Hospital until Satie’s death on July 1, 1925. The art songs were arranged by Robert Caby (1905–1992), a composer and ardent admirer of Satie’s music. By contrast, Sylvie is a shy, adoring paean to a beloved, set over a modulating accompaniment moving in circular patterns. Elegie is an unblinking, sad look backward, not without a certain theatricality. Satie’s art songs have a bracing directness they never dissemble. For this recording, arrangements of La Diva and Je te veux were commissioned from composer Easley Blackwood. In the two waltzes, a predictable lilt never obscures Satie’s erotic intention and appreciation for his poets’ ability to surprise. In the latter, however, Satie’s uncompromising compositional integrity helps his listener focus vividly on the “leetle girl” with the mocking smile. Tendrement and the forthright, heady Je te veux would be perfectly at home in a popular music hall, and La Diva de l’Empire could easily become a vehicle for a fin du siècle grisette. The songs presented here include three parlor tunes alongside several miniature art songs. Satie’s music does not order itself into one style. He is owed a great debt by countless others (including the group of subsequent French composers known as “Les Six”) who emulated and developed his ideas of harmony, melodic line, and musical architecture.
In artistic circles, Satie was a peripatetic disturber of the peace. Throughout his creative life, Satie sought to avoid the inauthentic, the falsely emotional, the unobservant glance at the commonplace. Perpetually stimulating for artists of all types, France’s blend of fresh thought and strong tradition is exemplified by Erik Satie. I hope listening to it will prove equally rewarding for you.
Performing this wealth of literature with so many great musicians has been a wonderful sojourn for me. These, of course, joined the procession along with the newly made Satie arrangements from Easley Blackwood, all of which were a thrill for me to premiere with The Chicago Chamber Musicians. It was a sweet surprise to receive among the Tailleferre scores from Salabert four songs that were (to my knowledge) previously unrecorded. We might well have titled this disc “La vie est un repas,” except that the project really was a parade across continents, involving a legion of artists: we began performing and recording with the Czech National Symphony in Prague and ended in Chicago, assisted by the extensive vocal/instrumental archives of Editions Salabert in Paris. Satie’s songs are an amazing collection of dramatic wit and warmth that tie the whole program together the way wine and spices unify a meal. The Tailleferre songs use deceptively simple material the way a master baker makes a baguette: the result appears inevitably natural and tastes irresistible. I came to the world of song literature through my passion for theater and my fascination with folk music. The Britten setting of Rimbaud poems has also challenged and sustained me for some years now. “I fell in love with Milhaud’s music early in my singing life, and was privileged to perform these songs with the Montreal Symphony during my first international competition. This unique program features Benjamin Britten’s evocative masterpiece for soprano and strings, Les Illuminations, and Darius Milhaud’s rarely-recorded vocal tour de force, originally written for Lily Pons, Quatre Chansons de Ronsard along with delightful rarities by Erik Satie and Germaine Tailleferre (the only female member of “Les Six”).
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