It's nearly a century since Satie composed his Vexations for piano and chose its title with characteristic acuity. It consists of a very slow theme of 18 notes without time signature and using every note save G sharp/A flat, which is followed by two 'variations', one with two voices above mostly in parallel tritones and the other (after the plain theme again) with the additional voices once more, but inverted—which, as the tritone above inverts into another tritone below, ''intensifies stasis and irritation'', as Alan Marks's booklet-note puts it. All this takes 2'06''. After that, the composer tells the pianist ''to play this motive 840 times successively''. For the world premiere in 1983, John Cage organized a team of pianists and the work lasted just under 19 hours, while some later performances have taken the whole 24 of a day and night, as Satie evidently intended; but here Marks and Decca have only partially grasped the nettle and give us 40 repetitions, or as the pianist puts it, ''just an introduction''!
Well, what is a critic to say? This one is conscious of the composer's mischievous spirit hovering and ready to mock his pronoucements, and may perhaps be forgiven for keeping his head down a little. The music is by no means disagreeable and Marks, who finishes his performance with a last statement of the plain theme and then 20 seconds of studio atmosphere, seems as persuasive an advocate as we are likely to find for a piece that he says ''creates its own time zone'' and describes as ''sphinxlike... Cyclic, Sisyphean, a musical Moebius strip, a language complete in itself, a completion which remains unresolved. It seems to move towards infinity, its dimensions stretching exponentially.'' Marks goes on, ''There are no instructions for the listener''. As for the record collector, my advice is that this CD is only for the faithful or the truly adventurous. The piano sound is close and accompanied by an unacceptable level of background noise, some of which appears to come from the instrument's action.'