I listened to 13 hours of live avant-garde music on repeat – here's what happened

Telegraph

25-04-2025

The notorious piano work Vexations by the smiling prankster of modern music Erik Satie is aptly named. What could be more vexing than to hear the same solemn procession of chords interspersed with a ghostly melody repeated 840 times, lasting up to 16 hours?
More than vexed, I felt some trepidation. I was afraid Satie's ghostly, harmonically wavering piece – which usually takes between one and two minutes to play – would make me want to scream after one hour, let alone 16. I was determined to stick it out to the end, with minimum breaks, but wasn't sure why. Part of me felt I was falling for an elaborate practical joke.
Pianist Igor Levit also sees the humour – he joked at one point that he might just round the performance up to a full 1,000 repetitions. Nonetheless he takes it seriously enough to do what no other pianist has ever succeeded in doing – play this piece solo (though teams of a dozen or more have played it many times). I allowed myself several quick tea and food breaks, but Levit is made of sterner stuff. He made two concessions to human frailty. He allowed himself loo-breaks (I counted four, though I may have missed some). And bowls of fruit and bottles of water were placed discreetly near the piano stool.
Aside from the sheer physical challenge, there's another motive for tackling the monster. Some say that on the other side of boredom there's a state of spiritual transcendence, which Satie's thin little piece could lead us to. That's certainly the view of the well-known performance artist Marina Abramović, who conceived a theatrical action to accompany Thursday's performance. In the pre-concert chat she gave us a firm talking-to about how we should spiritually prepare ourselves. Don't cross your legs. Don't drink beer. Don't look at your phones. Breathe with me.
The Southbank's Queen Elizabeth Hall stage was a dazzling spectacle. The floor area was divided into small white squares, in the middle of which was a raised platform of identically sized gun-metal-coloured cubes. On this sat the grand piano. The whole design was reflected from above in a huge tilted mirror.
Levit slipped onstage, flashed us a quick smile, and launched the piece with his typical frowning, concentrated gravity and exquisite touch. Occasionally he would add a touch of pedal or a little crescendo, and later made changes of tempo which in the prevailing glacial calm seemed like high drama. However the performance took a while to settle, thanks to the audience. Free to come and go, and deprived of their phones, many became restive and started to troop out almost immediately – only to return later. I've been in calmer bus terminals.
Meanwhile, around Levit a hugely slow ritual action unfolded. Two female 'celebrants' in black-and-white very slowly removed cubes from the edges of the platform and slid them to new positions to form seats. They then accompanied members of the audience to these seats to witness Levit's performance close-up, with that reverent care nurses use with convalescing patients.
I was one of them. I was sat right behind Levit, and could see that he was playing repetition 329 out of 840. Discarded sheets of music (one photocopy for each repetition) lay scattered about, as well as grapes and water for the pianist. By then – around 3pm, five hours after it began – Levit's fatigue was showing. He leaned face down on the piano lid, and would occasionally stretch a leg or foot to ward off cramp. Occasionally there was a wrong note. But then he got a second wind, playing the gnomic, angular chord-sequence with an epic gravity for a few renditions, before subsiding back to meditative quiet. Eventually he slipped out for another loo-break.
As time wore on, and Levit became wearier, so the tempo of the repetitions increased. Around midnight, as the last of the 13 hours approached, he seemed frankly bored, and the tempo too fast to do justice to the music's strange meandering melancholy. One's interest shifted to Abramović's beautifully realised conception of bringing the audience into the action, performed with tender yet uncanny grace by the two 'celebrants', Sara Maurizi and Jia-Yu Chang Corti. One audience member I met during a tea-break said it made her think of the Fates guiding spirits to the underworld. A very apt image, when given a twist. Instead of finding the god of the underworld, those spirits found a weary Sisyphus of the piano, condemned to repeat a strange, haunted music until the end of time.
In all, it was more emotionally suggestive experience than previous performances of Vexations I've attended, though less satisfying musically – this is a piece that really needs a team of pianists. Even so, an hour would have been plenty. After all, mortification of the flesh may lead saints to heaven – but in itself it's no guarantee of a profound musical experience.