“Erik Satie and John Cage are UFOs in the world of music, because they envisioned music through a completely different prism,” says pianist Bertrand Chamayou. “They are pioneers in the sense that, for many people, they changed the very idea of what music must be.”

With his album Letter(s) to Erik Satie Chamayou pays tribute to two idiosyncratic, innovative and influential composers, one born in Normandy in 1866, the other in Los Angeles in 1912. There is a strong connection between them: Cage considered Satie a source of inspiration.

Satie takes pride of place on the album with such pieces as the three Gymnopédies and the seven Gnossiennes, while Cage is represented by five pieces and a work attributed to him following its rediscovery amongst the papers of his disciple James Tenney – whose musical homage to Satie also features in the programme.

Chamayou recorded the album at the state-of-the-art Miraval Studios in Provence, which inspired him to take an experimental approach: “I thought we should do something a little different – and I thought of Erik Satie. This was an opportunity to get really intimate with the piano … Satie is really a special case, a strange musician unlike anyone else.”