The catalogue already has several recitals of Satie's piano music, and the 1992 Good CD Guide lists three recommended discs, so that one may perhaps be forgiven for thinking that these two issues present a case of having too much of a good thing. However, matters are not so simple: the first of them is not new at all, but a mid-price reissue of Peter Dickinson's Conifer disc, which I reviewed two years ago under the title ''The Essential Erik Satie''.
Dickinson's recital is one of the three recommended in the Good CD Guide and deservedly so. I thought highly of the playing and rich-sounding recording made in The Maltings, Snape, when I first heard it, and still do, so that I may recapitulate my earlier comments. Dickinson expertly conveys the unique blend of humour and gravity in his wide-ranging choice of pieces (there are 31 tracks in all), and the Trois Gymnopedies have a tender, dignified sadness, while there's panache and charm in the waltzes cafe-concert waltzes Poudre d'or and Je te veux. This composer's wit is uneven, and I wrote in my earlier review of the ''occasional dampish squibs among Satie's fireworks'', but at his best he is something special and this recital is an attractive compilation as well as being a generous one at 77 minutes.
That is hard on John Lenehan, whose recital for Earthsounds comes at full price and offers 14 minutes less music. Like Dickinson, he has written his own booklet essay, and also shows a penetrating insight into this wayward composer whose pawky laconicism may owe something to his Scottish mother, although she died when he was only six. The title of this disc refers to the Rosicrucian music of one work on it, the three preludes from the 'Chaldean pastoral' of 1891, Le fils des etoiles, that Satie possibly intended for other instruments but survives only as a piano score. As for the playing generally, Lenehan impresses me rather as Dickinson does, but also brings to the music a personal sensitivity and tenderness that is at once evident in the piece which opens his recital, the first of the Gnossiennes. What follows does not disappoint, either, although I'm not sure that it's a good idea to split the six Gnossiennes into two equal groups of which the second comes towards the end of the recital. Lenehan may have done this for fear of these rather similar pieces (which mostly resemble each other in mood, though not in notes) becoming monotonous; but that kind of 'monotony' is part of Satie and the Gymnopedies are more alike.
Inevitably, perhaps, they are on both of these discs; so are four other works. Yet despite the duplications, these are many things in Lenehan's recital that I would not want to be without, such as his moving playing of the Reverie du pauvre, his thoughtful account of Je te veux and the witty performance of Le Piege de Meduse. He's also crisper and more brilliant than Dickinson in the first of the three Chapitres tournes en tous sens. This disc has a very natural sound, but there are some mis-spellings among the French titles.'