With his album Letter(s) to Erik Satie, pianist Bertrand Chamayou pays tribute to two singular, innovative, and influential composers, Erik Satie and John Cage. It all begins with 'All Sides of the Small Stone, for Erik Satie', a kind of gymnopédie that John Cage supposedly slipped into a score by his disciple James Tenney, without his knowledge. Discovered after the latter's death, doubt remains: are these few notes truly from Cage's hand? It is around this mystery that this hypothetical triangular dialogue unfolds between Cage, Tenney, and their idol Erik Satie, a composer who continues to fascinate and intrigue us to this day. "Erik Satie and John Cage are UFOs in the world of music, because they envisioned music through a completely different prism," explains pianist Bertrand Chamayou. "They are pioneers in the sense that, for many, they changed the very idea of what music should be." There is a close link between them: Cage considered Satie a source of inspiration. Satie is featured on the album with pieces such as the three Gymnopédies and the seven Gnossiennes, while Cage is represented by five pieces and a work attributed to him after being rediscovered in the archives of his disciple James Tenney — whose musical tribute to Satie is also on the program. Chamayou recorded the album in the ultramodern studios of Miraval, in Provence, which inspired him to adopt an experimental approach: "I told myself I had to do something a bit different, and I thought of Erik Satie. It was an opportunity to enter the intimacy of the piano... Satie is truly a unique case, a strange musician unlike anyone else."
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