“A radical lens is taken to Satie in Goss’s Gnossiennes. Satie’s radical and visionary music is treated to increasingly clear interventions undertaken with great sympathy and not a little reverence along with a distinct degree of cheek at times.”Classical Guitar Magazine "Stephen Goss is a concert guitarist, a composer of distinction, an academic and an arranger capable of brilliance. His treatment of some of Satie's Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies emphasised the precise, clean writing: shared out equally among the four guitars, it made a profound impression, Gnossienne No.2 in particular weaving a spell almost disturbing in its intensity."
Colin Cooper, Classical Guitar Magazine, March 2005
The eccentric French composer Erik Satie wrote his six Gnossiennes for piano toward the last decade of the 19th century; the word itself was invented by Satie, probably in reference to the Greek word gnosis, which is related to spiritual knowledge. Stephen Goss has taken Nos. 2, 3, and 4 of the Gnossiennes and reinvented them for four guitars, putting quite a lot of himself in these superb presentations. Although they have the Goss stamp on them, they still manage to retain the original characteristics-one acknowledges the original composer here; it is as if Satie has been brought up to date. The atmosphere Goss manages to cleverly instill in this “simple” music-utilizing cross-rhythms, string brushing, harmonies, and plentiful dynamic instructions is quite astounding. In 1897, Satie’s friend, Claude Debussy, orchestrated two of the three Gymnopédies (composed by Satie just prior to his Gnossiennes) and almost as a “bonus track,” Goss has included his arrangement for guitar quartet based upon those orchestrations. Again, these are very attractive arrangements and work extremely well in this format. Both the original Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes are widely known and performed justifiably so and these new presentations deserve a wide audience, too. It’s likely the great man would have strongly approved of these magnificent pieces. Technically, each part is not that difficult on its own; the hard part is piecing together the four lines and producing the high musicianship required to make this music work.
-Steve Marsh (Classical Guitar Magazine)
Goss’s interplay with Satie takes more than one form. The two Gymnopédies are heard in fairly straightforward arrangements, via Debussy’s orchestrations of the originals. The three Gnossiennes, on the other hand, are more subtly reworked, beautifully reconceived and developed in terms of this particular instrumentation. Stephen Goss’s work as a composer is by no means limited to pieces for his own instrument, the guitar (or multiples thereof) – bearing in mind such pieces as, say, his Garden of Cosmic Speculation (2005) for bass clarinet, violin, cello and piano – but his intimate knowledge of the instrument is certainly central to the sheer quality of these works.
