On March 13 I made my way to the Notre Dame de Sion French Lycée in Harbiye for yet another musical event put on by the school. This time the performer was Denis Pascal, a pianist who is the father of Aurélien Pascal, the cellist who played İlyas Mirzayev’s Cello Concerto with great panache at the Cemal Reşit Rey Concert Hall in December 2023.
Monsieur Pascal is one of those pianists who like to start playing as soon as they sit down at the piano stool, without waiting for the audience to settle down. In this he is similar to Javier Perianes, whose recital – one of the now extinct and much-lamented ‘Istanbul Recitals’ at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum in Emirgan – I attended seven years ago. In my review of that concert I said that after the interval Perianes ‘strode onto the platform and immediately stopped the chatterers in their tracks’ with the opening bars of Debussy’s La puerta del vino, from Book II of his Préludes.
The first piece M. Pascal played was a little-known work by Erik Satie – Le fils des étoiles (‘The Son of the Stars’), the first of the three *Préludes* that were written in 1891 to accompany a three-act ‘poetic drama’. *Le fils des étoiles* dates from the composer’s ‘Rosicrucian’ period, which lasted from 1891 to 1895. During the first two years of this period Satie was official composer and ‘chapelmaster’ of the Mystic Order of the Rose + Cross, an esoteric, religious and artistic group led by Joséphin Péladan, who was also the author of the ‘poetic drama’. Le fils des étoiles, subtitled A Chaldean Pastoral, is in fact a series of philosophical monologues delivered by a shepherd. The music, which resembles Satie’s Gnossiennes (composed during 1890–93) in its uncompromising inscrutability, begins with a series of dissonant chords that Olivier Messiaen might have written in his early period. The printed score contains weird instructions by Satie telling the pianist how each passage should be played. These include such gems as ‘White and immobile’, ‘Pale and hieratic’, ‘Like a gentle request’, ‘Complacently lonely’ and ‘Watch from afar’. No wonder the audience – who, incidentally, were bored stiff by the ‘poetic drama’ – found the music totally incomprehensible.
Indeed, the first performance, at the Salon de la Rose + Croix in March 1892, was an unmitigated disaster. This was the first time Satie’s music had been publicly performed outside the cabarets of Montmartre, in which he served as a poorly-recompensed pianist. It was a highly publicised event, and as a result was attended by the critic Henry Gauthier-Villars, who wrote under the pen-name ‘Willy’. In his subsequent review in L’Écho de Paris, Gauthier-Villars described Satie as the ‘ex-pianist of the ground floor of the Chat Noir’ and slated the work. This led to a decade-long feud between the two men: Satie dubbed his critic a ‘dreary piece of literary garbage’, and his adversary countered by calling the composer a ‘mystical sausage-brain’. In fact, at a concert in 1904 there was an altercation during which, according to the pianist Ricardo Viñes (who later became a leading advocate for Satie’s music), ‘Willy struck Erik Satie with his cane after Satie had intentionally thrown Willy’s hat on the floor. The city police took Satie away.’
Here is Satie’s Le fils des étoiles played by Alexei Lubimov, with the score. The programme notes under the YouTube version provide some useful comments on the piece’s harmonic innovations, which predate departures in the same direction by Scriabin, Bartók, Stravinsky, Milhaud, Debussy, Ravel – and, as mentioned earlier, Messiaen.
I thought the Satie, with its arresting oddness, made a good concert-opener. Next, M. Pascal played a Chopin Nocturne – Opus 15 No 3 in G minor. This piece, with its wistful atmosphere, made an interesting contrast with the Satie. Both are slow pieces in minor keys. The Chopin, however, is much more approachable as it appeals to recognisable emotions. Chopin wrote his 21 Nocturnes between 1827 and 1846, building on a form already established by the Irish composer John Field – whom Chopin greatly admired in his younger days, considering him a major influence. It was from Field, in fact, that Chopin took the singing melody in the right hand accompanied by broken chords in the left, and the extensive use of the pedal. When the two men met in 1832, however, Field failed to reciprocate the warmth of feeling: having heard Chopin’s Nocturnes, he is said to have described their composer as a ‘sickroom talent’. It is indeed true that there is sometimes an element of morbid sensitivity, and not a little darkness, in Chopin’s work (in the 19th century, this feature would have been described as ‘neurasthenia’). However, I doubt if he would have appreciated having attention drawn to it. Never a very healthy man, in his later years Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin was racked by debilitating illness, and he died of tuberculosis at the age of 39.
After that it was back to Satie, with his 1914 Les Trois Valses distinguées du précieux dégoûté (‘The Three Distinguished Waltzes of a Jaded Dandy’) – short, satirical pieces that are widely seen as a nose-thumbing to Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, which had appeared in 1911. The ‘Jaded Dandy’ in the title is almost certainly Ravel, whose sartorial elegance was well known in Paris. Satie, who had been rescued from obscurity by Ravel when the latter brought him to public attention in 1911, was not good at repaying debts of gratitude, or at keeping friends, especially in his later years. Of these musical portraits, written from three different perspectives – ‘His waist; His pince-nez; His legs’ – Rollo H. Myers (author of the 1948 biography Erik Satie) states that ‘Despite the absence of bar lines the stresses, often cunningly displaced, fall naturally into place, and each piece is impeccably ‘cut’ and shaped. The harmonies, never thicker than three voices, are original as only Satie’s harmonies can be, and characteristically dry.’ Judge for yourself. The following recording of the Les Trois Valses distinguées du précieux dégoûté by Jean-Yves Thibaudet is accompanied by the score.
M. Pascal then got down to business with the three pieces in Debussy’s 1907 Images, Book II – Cloches à travers les feuilles (‘Bells through the leaves’), Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut (‘And the moon descends on the temple that was’) and Poissons d’or (‘Golden fish’). It was here that the pianist’s artistry made itself felt in earnest: the middle parts in these complex pieces, written in three staves as opposed to the usual two, were well brought out. The quieter passages were executed with gentle, stroking movements, while the climaxes were satisfyingly dramatic, and Poissons d’or was played at a fast tempo that showcased the performer’s impressive technique.
This performance of Images, Book II, recorded at the Verbier Festival in 2018, is by the South Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho, who in my opinion plays Debussy with the sensitivity Debussy demands.
The recital then continued with another Chopin Nocturne – this time, Opus 48 No 1 in C minor, a piece that starts off in a rather portentous, declamatory style but soon quietens down into a chorale-like interlude in the major key. Then, however, it gets hot under the collar, with upward-sweeping octaves ending in crashing chords. Here is an adrenalin-rich performance by the young Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki (note that you might need to turn the volume up a notch or two):
This was followed by No 1 of Satie’s Trois Gnossiennes. The ‘mystical’ atmosphere of these works is very likely the product of the composer’s flirtation with Rosicrucianism and gnosticism – something in which he was not alone: there was a great deal of interest in occultism and esotericism in late 19th-century France. I was gratified to see that the pianist well understood that the Gnossiennes need to be left to speak for themselves, with due regard for their remoteness, and not belaboured for every last drop of emotional juice that can be squeezed out of them (this being something that I think Fazıl Say, in particular, is guilty of).
The Chopin-Satie dialogue then continued with Chopin’s Nocturne in D flat major, Opus 27 No 2, and his Polonaise fantaisie, Opus 61. The Nocturne in D flat major is a good illustration of the typical Chopin Nocturne format – a melody in the right hand accompanied by broken chords in the left. Here is a recording of the piece played by the renowned Chopin interpreter Artur Rubinstein (1887–1982), with the score.
Chopin’s Polonaise-fantaisie, written in 1846, is more of a fantaisie than a polonaise, having taken only its three-four rhythm from the polonaise tradition; the rest is Chopin’s inspiration. There is no shortage of drama in this piece, but I am particularly fond of the restful middle section, the music for which bristles with double sharps. This starts at 06:25 in the following – pleasingly unhurried – recording by the (comparatively) young Polish pianist Rafał Blachacz, who won the 15th International Chopin Piano Competition in 2005.
What I found particularly pleasing about M. Pascal’s rendition of these two Chopin pieces was his restraint in the rhythm department: he never allowed the rubato to obscure the underlying beat. His playing was assured and confident – he knows how to let rip with rapid-fire octaves when called upon to do so – without becoming overbearing.
He concluded his recital with yet another Satie-Chopin contrast: Satie’s Gnossienne No 3 followed by Chopin’s Ballade No 4 in F minor, Opus 52. In the Satie I thought he slowed down rather too much before the end of an already-slow piece. (This is the only criticsm I can make of his playing throughout the entire concert.) Then he launched straight into Chopin’s 1842 Ballade No 4, a work dedicated to Baroness Charlotte de Rothschild. Baroness Charlotte was the daughter of James Mayer de Rothschild, who founded the French branch of the Rothschild family and established it as chief banker to the French government. She and her parents were major figures in Parisian culture who patronised not only Chopin – he became Charlotte’s piano teacher in 1841 – but also Gioacchino Rossini, Honoré de Balzac, Eugène Delacroix and Heinrich Heine. Not just a collector of art (she counted Camille Corot, Henri Rousseau and Édouard Manet among her friends), she was also an accomplished artist in her own right, acknowledged for her landscape paintings, watercolours and engravings in the Benezit Dictionary of Artists.
M. Pascal proved himself more than equal to the multiple challenges – of interpretation as well as technique – posed by the Ballade. I especially admired the smoothness of his super-speedy running passages and his subdued, brooding treatment of the darker pianissimo moments of this exercise in bipolar mood swings. Grant Hiroshima, writing on the ‘LA Phil’ website, says that this piece ‘surveys a vast emotional terrain and is one of the composer’s greatest achievements. Moving effortlessly from heroic declarations to intimate lyricism, Chopin’s tale ends in a brutal, fiery coda.’ Not sure about the ‘effortless’ part, but anyway... Here is the Ballade No 4 played, once again, by Seong-Jin Cho. (I did indeed consider performances by other pianists, but the Martha Argerich one did not have satisfactory recording quality, and Maurizio Pollini’s rendition came across as too bright and brittle for my taste.)
Monsieur Pascal gave us an excellent recital at Notre Dame de Sion. The school deserves congratulation, and thanks, for bringing him to Istanbul. Not for nothing was he appointed professor at the Conservatoire Nationale de Musique in Paris in 2011. I will conclude by quoting a review of his Satie recordings in the French classical music magazine Diapason. This critique aptly sums up the strengths of his playing in general, not just his specific talent for interpreting Satie: ‘This singular pianist, who possesses a seductive sonority, develops a French elegance with sureness, putting it at the service of a reading of Satie’s pieces that is both intense and measured, finding the right distance to extract its elusive poetry.’ Perhaps one day we will hear him and his cellist son Aurélien playing duets, or possibly these two plus his other son Alexandre (a violinist) playing piano trios in Istanbul? I certainly hope so. And so... À bientôt Inshallah, Monsieur Pascal!
