Satie: La Belle Excentrique - wind quintet

Arranged standard wind quintet.

Flute doubles on piccolo in the Ritournelle.

La belle excentrique (The Eccentric Beauty) is a dance suite for small orchestra by French composer Erik Satie. A parody of music hall clichés, it was conceived as a choreographic stage work and by modern standards can be considered a ballet.

Satie gave it the whimsical subtitle "fantaisie sérieuse" ("A Serious Fantasy"). It was premiered at the Théâtre du Colisée in Paris on June 14, 1921, conducted by Vladimir Golschmann. The composer later arranged it for piano four hands.

Satie composed this set of solo dances between July and October 1920. It was a high-spirited throwback to his turn-of-the-century cabaret idiom after a brief "serious" period that had produced the cantata Socrate (1918) and the piano Nocturnes (1919). The suite consists of three dances (march, waltz, can-can) and an instrumental ritornello.

 Grande ritournelle (Grand Ritornello)
1. Marche franco-lunaire (Franco-Lunar March) 
2. Valse du mysterieux baiser dans l'œil (Waltz of the Mysterious Kiss in the Eye)
3. Cancan Grand-Mondain (High-Society Cancan)

Great fun to perform