I've been a Satie fan since 1971, when I discovered a strange gatefold album of his music in a department store in Vancouver, Washington. The album's performers (who called themselves the “Camarata Contemporary Chamber Group”) took Satie's piano music and arranged it for Moog synthesizer, harpsichord, guitar, plaintive woodwinds, and a whispery string ensemble. It wasn't the way Satie originally wrote it, but I didn't know that. All I knew was that I'd never heard anything like it before.
I now own three complete sets of Satie's complete works by different performers. His Nocturnes, which he wrote during the last few years of his life, are among my favorite pieces of music. Rollo Myers says of them: “The style is chastened, simplified, uncompromising in its rejection of any sensuous appeal, but the music is strangely impressive in its bleakness and almost inhuman detachment.”
It is also, when performed sympathetically, music of great tenderness.
Here, from the LP I bought in 1971, is the Camarata arrangement of the First Nocturne.
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