Satie’s humour is too deep to be taken frivolously and I’m happy to say that Yutaka Sado approaches this music with the respect and care it deserves. Phrasing and articulation are scrupulously accurate and the result‚ supported by excellent insert­notes from the great Satie authority Ornella Volta‚ should have been an important disc in every respect. I say ‘should’ because there has been‚ in my view‚ one crucial misjudgement which impairs the whole enterprise. The idea of a disc containing a wide variety of Satie’s orchestral music seems initially to be an excellent one. The problem is to find a venue suitable for this wide variety. I am no great lover of the acoustics of the Salle Wagram‚ but it does no lasting harm to Parade (which Sado bravely takes at a more or less uniform tempo as the composer wanted‚ even if the pulse is not quite the 76­to­the­minute that’s specified) nor to the atmospheric orchestrations of the two outer Gymnopédies by Debussy and of two Preludes and a Gnossienne by Poulenc. But the cavernous acoustics are far more menacing to the health of those works scored either for petit orchestre or for orchestre de brasserie. In many cases‚ too‚ the string band in these sounds too large to me‚ and altogether the intimacy they need is destroyed. I would also question Sado’s fast tempos in several places. In La belle excentrique his waltz tempo is decidedly brisk and in the ‘Cancan Grand­mondain’ there is surely no time for the dancers’ legs to do a shake as well as a lift? On the positive side though‚ it’s good to have some of the more unfamiliar Satie on disc‚ such as the waltz suite Poudre d’or of 1902 and the two extracts from Musique d’ameublement of 1920‚ the first with its hilarious Saint­Saëns quotation. Was Saint­Saëns’ death the following year the delayed effect of rage‚ I wonder?