Festival of Medieval and Renaissance Music Flores Musicae 2023

Kind of Satie

PAOLO PANDOLFO (Italy), viola da gamba, narrator
MICHELANGELO RINALDI(Italy), accordion, piano, toy piano
ANDREA PANDOLFO (Italy), trumpet and flugelhorn, narrator, voice, artistic direction

Kind of Satie is a sound never heard before, surprising in its ability to suggest and its transparency, achieved through the encounter of the electroacoustic viola da gamba with the modern trumpet and the flugelhorn, the accordion, the piano, the toy piano and the voices: “the universe of words” that Satie loved to write down as subtext or as bizarre annotations of expression in the scores of his songs, is revealed here.

Kind of Satie is composed of original pieces directly inspired by Satie’s brilliant compositions, the music (and words) by Erik Satie, free improvisation and surprising forays into the baroque repertoire for viola da gamba.

The pieces of “Le Trois sonneries de la Rose+Croix” (1892) and “Sports et Divertissements” (1914), composed by Satie in a time span that goes between the fin de siècle and the beginning of the First World War, are the matrix of the project and more generally a source of inspiration for the construction of form and content of our artistic creation.

What is current in today’s world – increasingly disoriented between new wars and the global climate crisis – in Sports et Divertissements which tell the story of the “cowardly carefreeness” of the beautiful and good French bourgeoisie a few weeks after the start of the First World War? How current and shareable is for us musicians Satie’s militant breakdown of musical conventions, often so emptied of meaning in his era as in ours?

Andrea Pandolfo