In an artistic gesture as radical as it is poetic, the Teatro Colón Experimentation Centre (CETC) will pay tribute to composer and pianist Erik Satie with a 24-hour tribute this month.
In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the French pianist’s death, the Teatro Colón will present two ambitious concerts celebrating one of music’s most enigmatic and revolutionary figures. The programme, combining avant-garde performance with quiet contemplation, features ‘Vexations’ and ‘Socrate,’ two works that reflect Satie’s enduring challenge to the conventions of Western music.
The tribute begins on Friday, November 14, at 8.30pm, with 'Vexations,' a 24-hour performance marathon that will run uninterrupted until Saturday, November 15, at the same time. Entry will be free and continuous through Pasaje de los Carruajes (Tucumán 1171), allowing the audience to come and go at will. The minimalist score – barely two minutes long – is to be repeated 840 times, in keeping with Satie’s own eccentric instructions: to be played “in the deepest silence by means of serious immobile features.”
More than 95 pianists – internationally renowned concert pianists, musicians from other disciplines, established masters, young students and amateurs – will share the task in 10-minute rotations, embodying the work’s egalitarian spirit first revived by John Cage in 1963 at New York University. The performance will be accompanied by video projections, transforming the space into an immersive, meditative installation that fuses endurance, repetition and reflection.
The second part of the homage arrives later in the month with ‘Socrates,’ to be performed on Saturday, November 29, at 8.30pm, and Sunday, November 30, at 6pm. Based on texts by Plato, this rarely heard symphonic drama for piano, soprano and narrator will be performed for the first time on the Teatro Colón’s main stage. Satie himself regarded it as his masterpiece – a serene and luminous work that reveals his spiritual and philosophical side.
At a time when music seeks, once more, to expand its horizons, Satie’s figure remains both a beacon and a break – a demanding composer who is impossible to classify, one who embraced repetitiveness before minimalism was ever named. The CETC’s show celebrates that legacy with two performances demanding ears, patience and thought. An invitation to enter the silence of the obsessive and the beauty of the essential.
– TIMES/NOTICIAS/PERFIL
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