John Cage and Erik Satie never corresponded – the young American would only have been 12 years old when the French composer died in 1925 – but had they done so, one suspects it would have been an interesting meeting of creative minds.

Both composers eschewed convention, routine and tradition, but beyond this there are also similarities in musical style, which may come as a surprise to those expecting the usual shock-value associated with Cage. As pianist Bertrand Chamayou writes in his booklet notes for ‘Letter(s) to Erik Satie’, a direct lineage connecting the two can be heard in the calm, meditative qualities of Cage’s Dream and In a Landscape, both composed in 1948, when Cage was poring over Satie’s manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

As with Satie, the challenge with these deceptively simple pieces is to maintain perfect balance, weight, poise and equilibrium in the music throughout, alongside a clear sense of line and unswerving tempo. Chamayou manages this quite brilliantly in In a Landscape. He avoids adding any rubato, as heard in Alexei Lubimov (ECM, 7/02), and doesn’t make too much of the difference between melody and accompaniment. Unlike Herbert Henck (ECM, 10/05), Chamayou is also economical with the damper pedal, thereby avoiding too many blurred edges. Chamayou carries this approach into the Satie pieces, applying a relatively ‘brisk’ tempo in the three Gymnopédies and seven Gnossiennes to sculpt and shape lines and phrases with delicacy, care, warmth and subtlety.

Satie’s less-is-more approach is even more keenly felt in the recent chance discovery of a hitherto unknown Cage composition (this is Cage, after all). In December 2015 composer James Tenney’s widow, Lauren Pratt, unearthed a one-page manuscript hidden in one of her late husband’s scores, titled All Sides of the Small Stone, for Erik Satie. Based on a delicate harmonic ostinato that circles four-and-a-half times, around which is woven a softly swaying melodic line, Cage’s four-minute piece could easily be mistaken for a lost Gymnopédie. Satie would surely have approved.