Metropolis Ensemble commissioned a new arrangement for chamber orchestra of Erik Satie’s Sports et Divertissements from London-based composer David Bruce for our spring concert Loop.
Sports et Divertissements was originally written for piano and narrator in 1914 as a multi-media project of sorts. Satie provided piano music to drawings made by Charles Martin, a French illustrator from the Beaux Arts and Art Deco traditions. First published and performed in the early 1920s, Satie’s twenty brilliant thumbnails sketches illuminate Martin’s drawings with whimsical verbal and musical images of outdoor sports and amusements.
David Bruce offers his thoughts on creating a chamber orchestra arrangement:
Satie’s Sports et Divertissements presents itself in such a deliberately humble, almost self-depricating manner that it’s easy to overlook the quality of Satie’s inventiveness. Indeed, I think I only really appreciated the true depth and subtlety of Satie’s art once I began the process or orchestration.
From the instruments available, I tried to pick an orchestral palette which resonated with the subject matter of the individual pieces, (ranging as it does from circus clowns to and octopus in its cave) and in doing felt a sense of polishing up a tiny gem to reveal an extraordinary richness and strangeness. The tiniest of fragments which might whizz past in the piano piece and which might seem unremarkable, suddenly jumped into life… its true significance seeming stronger than ever.
Most notable were a wealth of connections with Satie’s Parisian contemporaries, particularly Debussy and Stravinsky… connections which had only been marginally apparent to me in listening to the piano version. What we now think of as a Stravinskian orchestral sound is particularly evident in the pieces that evoke the circus or the comedia del'arte characters - the combination of ‘earthy’ circus music sounds with the particular kinds of harmony and repetitive patterns Satie uses bring out the Stravinsky connection especially strongly - and makes one reconsider the extent of the influence Satie exerted on the great Russian composer.