For the fourth instalment in her acclaimed Satie cycle, Noriko Ogawa has gathered music written for the stage – from the pantomime Jack in the Box (1899) to the ballet Relâche (1924) – one of Satie’s last works. Several of the pieces exist in different scorings, but the piano versions heard here are all Satie’s own. Throughout the programme, what comes across strongly is the influence of music hall and cabaret; composed in 1900, Prélude de « La mort de Monsieur Mouche » even offers a hint of the ragtime, one of the first appearances of the genre in European music.

Stage projects are as a rule collaborative efforts, and among Satie’s collaborators were some of the leading names of the art world at the time. In 1924 he worked on Mercure with Jean Cocteau, Picasso and Léonide Massine, the same team that in 1916 had produced the ballet Parade, and the same year came Relâche, Satie’s collaboration with the Dadaist poet and painter Francis Picabia. For the intermission, Picabia and Satie involved the film director René Clair who made the film Entr’acte: a truly Dadaist offering which included disjointed episodes with a bearded ballerina, a hunter shooting a large egg, and a funeral procession with the hearse drawn by a camel. For the film, Satie provided a separate score, Cinéma, which has been called one of the first synchronized film scores.