It’s Day 2 (14 June 2025) of the Malta International Arts Festival (MIAF) 2025 and I had the pleasure to attend Ravel – Satie, which took place at Teatru Manoel, Valletta, on Saturday evening, featuring visiting artists (from Greece), multimedia and an international collaboration with local Maltese dance company Moveo.
It was a programme of two rather different halves. The first part (‘Ravel’) consisted of a series of instrumental chamber music works by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) for piano, violin and cello in different configurations, while the second part (‘Satie’) featured performances of two collaborative, multimedia works for which Erik Satie (1866-1925) composed musical scores: the Dadaist film Entr’acte by René Clair (1924), or to give its full title Entr’acte symphonique de Relâche, and the ‘ballet réaliste’ Parade (1917), originally a collaboration between many of the leading artistic figures in wartime Paris (Cocteau, Diaghilev, Satie, Picasso, Massine, Apollinaire). The restaging of Parade, with choreography by Moveo Dance Company, had been commissioned back in 2017 to mark the centenary of the original work and has enjoyed several performances (including abroad) since then.
The concept of the programme seemed to revolve around anniversaries: Ravel and Satie both share a ‘round-number’ anniversary in 2025 (150 years since Ravel’s birth and the centenary of Satie’s death). While at its best an anniversary is an occasion to shine light on neglected repertoire or figures, more often it functions to consolidate repertory in the canon, as if to preserve it behind glass. Anniversaries tend to be, in other words, all too official. Despite what Ravel and Satie have in common (they were both important musical figures in Paris in the decades around 1900 and more or less contemporaries), in reality they make a somewhat arbitrary pair: two very different musical personalities not only in terms of sound-world but also artistic and social temperament, and the works chosen for performance tonight tended to highlight the contrast.
We began with a virtuosic performance of Ravel’s ‘Alborado del gracioso’ for solo piano, the fourth of five descriptive pieces that make up the composer’s collection Miroirs. Acoustically, the Steinway piano came across as dry, a bit lifeless in the Teatru Manoel auditorium, yet pianist Konstantinos Destounis managed to conjure a range of colours and effects from the instrument. Destounis was then joined onstage by Konstantinos Panagiotidis (violin) and Dimitris Travlos (cello), as the audience were treated to a performance of Ravel’s Piano Trio in A minor, surely one of the most astonishing (and still underrated) works of chamber music ever written, a work of dark foreboding in addition to the sort of exquisite lyricism and colour more often associated with Ravel. The ensemble was at its best in moments of heightened anguish rendered with full-throated intensity. Less convincing were the delicate, intimate moments in the work, which often lacked dynamic subtlety or coordination. The communication between members of the ensemble left something to be desired. The violinist and cellist visibly made an effort to synchronise certain moments. More problematically, the violinist was positioned with his back to the pianist, making eye contact or any kind of visual communication practically impossible. (In conventional practice, the violinist in a piano trio is positioned further towards stage right to align with the pianist, placing them so to speak in the same line of longitude.)
After an interval of 20 minutes – too long, in my view, and awkwardly placed in the programme separating the two multimovement Ravel works – Panagiotidis and Travlos gave us Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello, in some ways a parallel work to the Trio (the two follow a similar sequence of movement types). In this densely chromatic Sonata shot through with moments of real wit and humour, the string instruments carried well in the space (compared with the old Steinway) and had a good rapport, especially in the haunting intimacy of the third movement as well as the march-like final movement, with echoes of Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat.
Things switch gears at this point, as the stage is rearranged for a live performance of Satie’s music for the avant-garde film Entr’acte (originally intended to be shown between the acts of a ballet). Although the film was shown on a large screen, the screen itself was somewhat far back on the stage, making the images appear smaller than they would ideally be, and almost provocatively calling into question the media hierarchy of sound and image (who is accompanying whom?). The piano was amplified for the Satie/Clair film screening (as indeed were all the instruments involved in the final work on the programme). The purpose of this sonic enhancement was unclear; if it had been intended to improve the acoustics of the instrument, the actual effect was more an uncanny audiovisual experience where the sound of the live piano resembles that of a pre-recorded track after all.
Everything comes together in the performance of Parade (music by Satie), which featured video images, including stop motion, as well as live dance performance by Diane Portelli and Dorian Mallia (Moveo) and a musical ensemble of piano, cello and percussion (Luke Baldacchino). There was much to recommend this production and its execution, especially Mallia and Portelli who carried the performance almost single-handedly. And it’s such an unusual type of theatrical work that any performance of Parade is an ‘event’. However, something is missing from the larger picture. Ultimately, Parade, and surrealist, multimedia works like it, are difficult to stage meaningfully in the 21st century when audiences have different expectations (social as well as aesthetic) from those of Parisian audiences in 1917, when the gesture of bringing the ‘trivial’ music of circus and music hall into a ‘serious’ theatre is no longer the scandal or shock it once was. This interpretation of Parade may be received as quirky, even cute, but only with difficulty can it be genuinely subversive or witty. (The sound of a pistol shot used in the original orchestration was, tellingly, replaced by a percussion effect.) Audiences can at best meet the work with a sort of curious admiration.
Speaking of audience behaviour, all movements of the Ravel Trio and the Sonata without exception were interrupted by applause, to the audible irritation of other patrons – apparently less a genuine, spontaneous reaction to the music than a dutiful adherence to (imagined) convention. There was no programme, physical or digital, provided for this specific performance, although the running order and a brief description were already given in the festival booklet. In any case, a spoken word or two to introduce each work – and perhaps to advise the audience how they might most effectively experience the music – would not go amiss.
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Malta International Arts Festival 2025
Ravel – Satie
Teatru Manoel, Valletta, 14 June 2025
Konstantinos Destounis – piano
Konstantinos Panagiotidis – violin
Dimitris Travlos – cello
Luke Baldacchino – percussion
Moveo Dance Company
Diane Portelli, Dorian Mallia
