WordStage Presents ECCENTRICITIES OF THE VELVET GENTLEMAN, 9/21-22

Only decades after his death in 1925 was French composer Erik Satie hailed as a genius of contemporary classical music. His work was extremely simple in structure, yet innovative and marked by a characteristic wryness and wit. His reliance on unusual harmonic configurations was a reaction against the heavy, symbol-rich music of his era, a time when the works of Romantic European composers like Richard Wagner were still very much in vogue, and the highly decorated Impressionism of his friend, Claude Debussy, was ascendant. Satie left a relatively scarce body of work behind, most of it written for the piano. But his groundbreaking use of bitonal or polytonal notes and "broken" rhythms would become a benchmark of twentieth-century modernist music.

Mentor, collaborator and colleague of and with the likes of Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, and Serge Diaghilev, Erik Satie's music transcended the accepted norms of Romanticism and Impressionism of the time and influenced generations of French composers that followed. A prolific writer and cartoonist, Satie wrote fantastic diaries he titled Memoirs of an Amnesiac and A Mammals Notebook and was a regular contributor to such magazines as the Dadaist 351 and the publication that was, and continues to be, the arbiter of contemporary style and taste, Vanity Fair. It is from these sources the text of this WordStage presentation is derived.

This performance features the artistry of WordStage Artistic Director Tim Tavcar as Satie and pianists HyunSoo Kim and Andrew Rosenblum, of the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Cleveland Classical Revolution.

8:00pm Friday, September 21, 2012 - The West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church
20401 Hilliard Blvd. Rocky River, OH

8:00pm Saturday, September 22, 2012 – The First Unitarian Church
21600 Shaker Blvd. at Belvoir Shaker, Heights, OH

Tickets $20 Adult $15 Seniors (62+) $10 Student through College
WordStage also maintains a 'Pay What You Can" policy at the door to make their performances accessible to anyone who wishes to hear them.

For Reservations call 216-712-6926. For information visit www.wordstagevt.com
Tickets are also available at the door beginning 45 minutes before the performance.