Ravel – Satie : review

Abstract

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.