The celebration of the 150th Anniversary of Satie’s birth will take place at the Conservatory Benedetto Marcello of Venice on the initiative of the cultural association Musica Venezia, Roberta Reeder, artistic director, with the collaboration of the Conservatory, the Archivio Carlo Montanaro, Tocnadanza Compagnia of Venice and the Alliance française.

This special event, “ERIK SATIE,” which will take place 2 July, includes three different segments which are repeated at 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. It is a journey dedicated to the artistic world of the French composer, in which his music was revolutionary at the time for its simplicity of expression and clarity of texture. The entire event includes cinema, music, and dance, interwoven by Satie’s music.

The first eventi is the film “Entr’acte,” an avant-garde work created as an intermezzo between acts of the ballet Relâche. This film will be presented by Carlo Montanaro. The music composed by Satie for this film will be performed by Francesco Bencivenga and Alessia Toffanin in a four-hand version for piano by Darius Milhaud.

In the second event, “Cabaret Satie,” Arianna Cimolin will sing several lovely songs written when the composer was a pianist at the famous cabarets Le Chat Noir and L’Auberge du Clou. There will also be a multi-media piece rarely performed, “Sports et divertissements,” a combination of Satie’s music played by Francesco Bencivenga, a recitation by Stefano Menagus of Satie’s poems and projections of Charles Martin’s designs.

To close there will be the premiere of the dance “Satie’s Rooms,” created by Michela Barasciutti, choreographer and director of Tocnadanza -- a deep immersion into the composer’s complex sensibility. The work will be performed by Ambrose Laudani, Giulio Petrucci, and Marta Zullet, accompanied by the two pianists and Anna Trentin, violin.

Erik Satie (Honfleur 1866 – Paris 1925). In the history of music, Satie was an important composer for his innovations. The very simplicity of his style was a revolution in French music, dominated in this period by Wagner’s complex harmonies and interwoven melodies, which required an enormous orchestra. As with Debussy, Satie supported the importance of turning against the Wagnerian adventure and establishing once again a national French idiom. Nevertheless, he did not see the answer in the vague romanticism of his friend, convinced that Impressionism was a dead end.

The main characteristic of Satie’s style is an economy of means, a simplicity of musical expression and clarity of texture. His pieces are composed of brief melodic and rhythmic phrases, repeated without any development and juxtaposed without any transition from one to the other a style which had great influence on the next generation, which included Milhaud and Poulenc. Important collaborators with Satie were figures such as Picasso, Cocteau and Picabia in the creation of famous ballets.