Satie seems to be definitely Flavour of the Month, and it is intriguing to think of the two French pianists here, Roge in Paris and Queffelec in a church near Newbury, recording him at precisely the same time. Listening to this extensive coverage of Satie's confections, it becomes evident that behind the eccentric blagueur who plastered his scores with silly surrealist comments, incorporated parodies of Mozart, Chabrier and Chopin's funeral march (typically acknowledged as ''Schubert's celebrated mazurka'') and quoted numerous nursery tunes, there lurked an innovator whose adoption of brevity, austere texture and plainsong-like archaisms fathered a reaction against the expansiveness and plush colour of the romantics, an experimenter who was using exotic scales, block triads and unresolved chords of the ninth before Debussy, a polytonalist ahead of his time, and—more importantly—a composer with a vein of fantasy (even though deficient in rhythmic variety.
Three of his earliest piano collections (from the late 1880s), presented by Reinbert de Leeuw, conscientiously illustrate his initial efforts but, frankly, make for a wearisome disc, containing as it does a succession of pieces not only all very slow in themselves but played at a snail's pace (some below my metronome's minimum marking and in places with two seconds between adjacent crotchets): the total effect is not so much somnambulistic as cataleptic. Queffelec's programme, drawn from the 1912–17 period plus the familiar Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes and a couple of transcriptions of music-hall songs, is far better planned for diversity and pleasurable listening, and is performed with commitment, tonal sensitivity and great finesse in rubato. Taking the opposite approach from the Buster Keaton-ish dead-pan delivery of Yuji Takahashi (Denon C37-7486, 9/86), she brings a bubbling gaiety to the Sonatine bureaucratique, energy to ''La chasse'' in Sports et divertissements (in which ''Le pique-nique'' points forward to Poulenc and the fourths of ''Le tango'' anticipate Milhaud's Saudades do Brasil), swagger to the Piccadilly cakewalk and a delicious lightness to the first of the Embryons desseches with their childish reiteration of final chords. (I understand Satie's quotation of La Marseillaise in ''Les courses''—following Debussy's example in his Feux d'artifice—but could some expert explain what the bon roi Dagobert was doing at the battle of Cimbres?)
Roge's net is cast wider, from the hieratic Prelude de la porte heroique of 1894 to the rarefied Nocturnes of 1919 (all but No. 4, which he included in his previous disc of Satie piano music—Decca 410 220-2DH, 10/84). In these late pieces, more serious and substantial in content than many of the inconsequential miniatures that had gone before, there are glimpses of Faure's influence, to which Roge's coolly elegant poise is well suited, and there is a notable purity in his cantabile in the second of the Airs a faire fuir. Elsewhere the acoustics of the Salle Wagram create some roughness of sound (as in the last of the ''Jaded dandy's'' three waltzes) and, in Poudre d'or, an impression of over-pedalling. It is instructive to compare Roge's rather routine playing of this cafe-concert waltz with Queffelec's beguilingly tender and lilting Je te veux; and when both pianists offer the same piece there are sometimes greater differences in interpretation than might be expected from this often naive music. There is a quite distinct divergence over articulation in the ''Carrier of big stones'' in the Chapitres tournes en tous sens, and much more vivid excitement in Queffelec's ''Chattering woman'' in the same set (Roge is altogether too polite); and in the passionate ''Reprimand'' of the Veritables preludes flasques she also shows more character. Her piano has a far better bass than Roge's, and is very cleanly but warmly recorded. There isn't really a question of choosing between these two discs, since the programmes do not overlap too much, but I have to say I enjoyed the Virgin Classics issue more.'