at the Paris Conservatoire in 1911 and was a vigorous champion of modern French music. She had previously teamed with Satie for the concert premiere of his ballet Parade in its piano 4-hands version in July 1917, the same month he wrote his sonatina. Author Jean Cocteau nicknamed her "The Piano Tamer" and future Les Six members Germaine Tailleferre, Francis Poulenc and Louis Durey dedicated works to her. Méerovitch's sudden death at 24 (from an intestinal ailment) was widely lamented in the French music scene. Pianist Marcelle Meyer would take Méerovitch's place as Satie's favorite interpreter of his keyboard music during his last years. The sonatina represents what biographer Steven Moore Whiting called "the culmination and also the end of Satie's humoristic piano music." His final compositions for that instrument, the Nocturnes (1919) and Premier Menuet (1920), were much more serious in tone. Satie's early biographers acknowledged the Sonatine bureaucratique as a precursor of Neoclassical music, but were otherwise unimpressed with the piece. Pierre-Daniel Templier (1932) relegated it to a footnote in his book, while Rollo H. Myers (1948) thought it was "not remarkable musically except as a fairly successful but unexciting pastiche". Since then, however, it has become one of Satie's more frequently performed and recorded works. Recordings Frank Glazer (Vox, 1968), Jean-Joël Barbier (Universal Classics France, 1971), Aldo Ciccolini (twice for EMI, 1971 and 1988), John McCabe (Saga, 1974), Daniel Varsano (CBS, 1979), Yūji Takahashi (Denon, 1979), Werner Bärtschi (Ex Libris, 1981), France Clidat (Forlane, 1982), Cordélia Canabrava Arruda (Fermata, 1983), Pascal Rogé (London, 1984), Roland Pöntinen (Bis, 1986), Gerhard Erber (Eterna, 1987), Anne Queffélec (Virgin Classics Digital, 1988), Yitkin Seow (Hyperion, 1989), Gabriel Tacchino (Disques Pierre Verany, 1989), Peter Dickinson (Conifer, 1992), Michel Legrand (Erato Records, 1993), Klára Koermendi (Naxos, 1993), Bojan Gorišek (Audiophile Classics, 1994), Jean-Pierre Armengaud (Mandala, 1996), Olof Höjer (Swedish Society Discofil, 1996), Andrea Tedesco (New Tone Records, 1996), Jean-Yves Thibaudet (Decca, 2001), Marcela Roggeri (Transart Live, 2005), Cristina Ariagno (Brilliant Classics, 2006), Stephanie McCallum (ABC Classics, 2007), Jeroen van Veen (Brilliant Classics, 2016), Noriko Ogawa (Bis, 2016). References External links Compositions by Erik Satie Neoclassicism (music) Satie 1917 compositions