En habit de cheval

[1] Robert Orledge wrote that "En habit de cheval offers the best example of Satie integrating Schola teaching with his own composition, and in it he also worked out his own individual concept of orchestration.

On 16 January Maurice Ravel played some of his early piano pieces at a concert sponsored by the progressive Société musicale indépendante (SMI), which began to promote him as an important precursor of modern trends in French music.

[3] This prompted Satie's friend (and Ravel's rival) Claude Debussy to conduct his 1896 orchestrations of the Gymnopédies at the Salle Gaveau on 25 March, an event that was enthusiastically received.

[4] Satie was given favorable attention in the Parisian press, publishers began to express interest in his music, and he attracted the first of his many young protégés, the 20-year-old composer and critic Alexis Roland-Manuel.

The suite was conceived in a vein similar to Satie's first notable Schola-era composition, the 1908 chorale and fugue for piano duet Aperçus désagréables (Unpleasant Glimpses).

[14] Encouraged by Roussel's approval and the quick sale of the original keyboard version, Satie immediately set about transcribing En habit de cheval for orchestra - his first mature attempt at the genre.

Although he had acquired instrumental technique "on the job" producing arrangements for cabaret ensembles in the early 1900s, he had not been properly schooled in orchestration until his Schola studies with d'Indy, beginning in 1909.

[26] During his studies with d'Indy Satie took away the advice that "the writing has an influence on the sonority,"[27] and for his arrangement of En habit de cheval he fashioned a spare, sober orchestral style that complimented the austerity of the material.

[28] In an era when lushly scored Neo-romantic and Impressionist music still held sway in concert halls, Satie's "thin" orchestral sound put him at odds with his French contemporaries, some of whom ascribed it to incompetence.

Other notable recordings are by Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale (Columbia, 1954), Francis Poulenc and Jacques Février (Musidisc, 1959), Frank Glazer and Richard Deas (Candide, 1970), Jean Wiener and Jean-Joël Barbier (Universal Classics France, 1971, reissued 2002), Wyneke Jordans and Leo van Doeselaar (Etcetera, 1983), Jean-Pierre Armengaud and Dominique Merlet (Mandala, 1990), Philippe Corre and Edoudard Exerjean (Disques Pierre Verany, 1992), Klára Körmendi and Gábor Eckhardt (Naxos Records, 1994), Bojan Gorisek and Tatiana Ognjanovic (Audiophile Classics, 1999), Jean-Philippe Collard and Pascal Rogé (Decca, 2000), Sandra and Jeroen van Veen (Brilliant Classics, 2013).