StageTalk Magazine does not normally review concerts or recitals but the Cheltenham Music Festival’s Erik Satie: Memoirs of a Pear-Shaped Life, because of the composer’s links to the performing arts, could not be ignored. Besides which, this was not a recital but a “theatrecital”, as the billing chose to describe it.
Satie was a true eccentric who meticulously catalogued his life and thoughts in words and so it was an easy, and maybe obvious, choice to combine the writings with the music. Meurig Bowen who devised and wrote the show took us chronologically through the composer’s life and times and the presentation was itself, befittingly, a little eccentric. Anne Lovett enigmatically wandered on stage at the beginning dressed in a little-girl sailor suit, her mass of curly locks surmounted by a large floppy blue bow. Selecting a piece of music from the box of books she carried, she strolled over to the piano and started to play.
Despite being a last minute replacement, David Bamber, well known for portraying often enigmatic characters on our screens, including Hitler in Valkyrie and Mr Collins in the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice, was perfectly cast to deliver Satie’s words. Complete with spats, wire rimmed specs and a bowler hat he conveyed Satie’s eccentricities so convincingly that we were happy to believe that living off a diet of only white food and making a necklace of sausages for his one-time mistress, the famous artists’ muse Suzanne Valadon, was entirely normal. The whole proceedings were dominated by a large, though not entirely successful, giant pear which was suspended over the stage. All very Magritte.
Satie’s best known tunes, the ubiquitous Gnossiennes and Gymnopedies, do tend to suffer a bit from over exposure and are even available on dozens of super-market Golden Classics type albums. That’s a pity as it clouds our judgement and influences our opinions. And, as we know, familiarity can, if we are not careful, breed contempt. Anne Lovett, though, with her beautiful playing, shed new light on the pieces to which we are all so accustomed and made us hear them anew. Satie’s piano pieces have such a dreamlike, mesmeric quality that it is easy to see how they, and the composer himself, were picked up by André Breton and the Surrealists.
Max Hoehn’s direction and design were themselves, as I indicated, often a little bizarre but combined with the excellent performances by David Bamber and Anne Lovett produced a very unusual and enjoyable evening. ★★★★☆ Michael Hasted 3/07/15
