Satie's Trois Gymnopedies: Classic or Dud?

the short one is great haven't listened to the second one yet. i'm a huge fan of this concept, including that guy who played 100 versions of the white album at the same time: https://soundcloud.com/rc428/side-1-x-100?in=l-b-w/sets/deadly-buzzes

oops link is to a playlist, here's the real one: https://soundcloud.com/rc428/side-1-x-100

learning how to play this myself recently, i've been listening to lots of different recordings of it. why does everyone perform these at fast tempos??? the slow takes are much, much more moving, in my opinion. the slowest version of No.1 i can find on spotify is a touch over 5 minutes long (by reinbert de leeuw), but most of them clock in around 3 minutes or less! i am bewildered by what appears to be the mainstream tempo interpretation for these pieces. the first song is fucking marked "SLOW AND PAINFUL". have any of these pianists ever endured slow pain? it doesn't sound like a fucking 3:12 version of the first gymnopedie, that's for sure.

anyone have any good slow performance recommendations, besides the reinbert de leeuw versions? i'm not looking for novelty 10% speed remixes, just some SLOW and PAINFUL versions.

here is every recorded version at the same time:
https://soundcloud.com/hey-exit/every-recording-of-gymnopedie-1

Look up Philip Corner’s album “Satie Slowly”. Not as long as five minutes for 1er but still glacial.

I agree that often his pieces are played too fast but de Leeuw is VERY slow !

I found a 6 minute no.1 on spotify just now, that's too slow though imo. i like the ones that come in at 4 minutes and change

i feel similarly about a lot of andante/largo written solo piano stuff re: most recordings being too fast. I'm trying to learn a rachmaninoff prelude (op 23 #4 in D) and almost everyone plays it a full minute faster than what I think sounds good. (ashkenazy nails it though)

I should learn these though, they fit my style and don't seem very hard for the payoff

Stunt slowness can easily be overdone imo. After Sviatoslav Richter’s super slow Schubert recordings, which were sometimes profound and sometimes boring, there started this occasional tradition of ridiculously slow recordings of Schubert and Liszt by pianists of later generations which almost never work imo. The molecular cohesion of the music just gives out. That said, totally agree that ‘slow and painful’ was not meant to be a moderate walking pace. Reinbert de Leeuw can definitely pull this kind of thing off - last week I listened to his live performance of a solo piano version of Liszt’s Via Crucis on YouTube which was beyond incredible in its painful stillness (look it up!).

Have definitely loved both fast and slow gymnopedies. Gnossienes I like a little faster (walking pace).

Not "slow and painful" - think of it as "slow and sorrowfully". The preamble to my ancient copy takes pains to impress that it's dance music so it has to at least kinda lope along a bit rather than a death march.

You can play #1 pretty fast and it sounds great imo (maybe since the tune is so familiar). 2 & 3 don't work as well.

I like hearing it very slow but I’m playing it somewhere in the neighborhood of mm60 I think which is slow but not funereal. A big thing to me seems to play sempre non rubato, avoid the temptation to slow way down for the cadences.

I’m only like two years and a bit into learning piano so nailing the dynamics is a substantial physical challenge for me. I’ve heard a range of interpretation there as well. How loud do the crescendos get? Where is the forte?