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Spectator
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Igor Levit's 12-hour performance of Satie's Vexations was far too short
So, in the end, it was long but not that long. Twelve hours, compared to the 20 hours-plus many of us had been anticipating. The fastest on record? Very possibly. Igor Levit had started Satie's Vexations at just after 10am on Thursday 24 April, and completed repeat number 840 of this niggly little bastard of a phrase around 10.30pm, preventing any kind of mass sleepover at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. No screens were required in the end either – screens that the Guardian had reported were scheduled to appear around the pianist to hide his modesty when the toilet beckoned. (The logistics of this seemed ambitious.) Instead whenever Levit decided it was time for a loo break he simply walked off stage. In the end there was also no need to get too irritated at Marina Abramovic for her conceptual interventions, as it wasn't these that spoiled the performance. What did spoil the performance was something more fundamental.
Telegraph
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
I listened to 13 hours of live avant-garde music on repeat – here's what happened
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.
The Guardian
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘He will not leave the stage. Ever': Marina Abramović and Igor Levit on their marathon 16-hour concerty
Amid the experiments and cross-genre collaborations in this year's Multitudes festival is one event that will challenge its performer as much as its audience – and the only one where specially appointed brow-moppers will be on hand. At 10am on 24 April in London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, pianist Igor Levit will begin a performance of a single piece, Erik Satie's Vexations, in a concert that will last at least 16 hours. A few tickets (for the full duration or one-hour slots) are still available for this extreme pianist endurance event. What should the audience expect to get out of it? 'I'd never tell an audience what they should experience,' says Levit. 'But I would encourage people to just literally let it go. There is no agenda in this piece. There is no meaning to it. It's just empty space, so just dive into that and let go. That would be the dream.' In May 2020, Levit found in the Covid lockdown, and the series of solo concerts he livestreamed from his Berlin apartment, an excuse to fulfil his dream of tackling this pianistic challenge. His first performance of Vexations was streamed from an empty room; it lasted 15 hours and 29 minutes. Satie's slight piece, a simple phrase that alone is perhaps 1-2 minutes long, was written in 1893 for keyboard (Satie didn't specify the exact instrument). The manuscript included the composer's note to potential performers: 'In order to play this motif 840 times in a row, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, through serious immobilities.' There's no evidence that Satie intended the piece to be performed in this manner, but over the years, artists such as John Cage have organised marathons at which the feat of repeating the piece 840 times has been accomplished by a succession of different pianists. It has rarely been played in its entirety by the same person, and never before live in the UK. During his 2020 meditations, Levit says he kept returning to the work of his friend, the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović. 'I thought, this is the musical embodiment of what Marina has been doing all these years,' he says, citing her method of counting individual grains of rice over hours to experience the benefits of self-discipline and mindfulness. 'You have this weird piece, a minute and a half long, which doesn't make any sense, which is neither beautiful or not, it's just there. And Satie didn't even say 'play it 840 times'; all he says is 'in order to do so, you should do X, Y and Z'. I thought Marina would love that.' He started talking to Abramović about the piece about two years ago, and the resulting collaboration has its world premiere next week, when the 38-year-old Russian-German pianist will perform Vexations in full without leaving the stage – and this time in front of an actual audience. Levit calls it 'chapter two' in his artistic collaboration with Abramović. The pair first blended their talents in 2015, for a production of the Goldberg Variations at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, an idea they hatched in London over an evening of Slavic soup and jokes. For this event the audience were prepared by having their mobile phones locked away and sitting in silence for 30 minutes as the piano slowly glided around and down the onstage runway. The duo's affection and mutual respect is evident as we speak on a video call. Levit, in Berlin, is munching on peanuts. Abramović, in New York, emerges on screen and scolds her 'genius boy'. 'You shouldn't eat peanuts because they can collect mould,' she says crossly. 'Since when do I listen to you?' he retorts, and so their playful banter continues. No one except Abramović, who has been plotting the QEH show these past months at her New York studio, knows quite what to expect from it. The performance, she explains, will shape and shift over the hours. The podium on which the piano sits is detachable and its different parts will fragment, like the pieces of a puzzle. 'We are creating some kind of sculptural element on the stage,' she says. Renowned lighting designer Urs Schönebaum is working with her to create mirror-like effects. The set will reflect back on itself, she explains. 'Everything you see down, you can see up.' The audience will be steeped in the Abramović method (the idea of using meditative repetition to enhance one's consciousness, applied this time to classical music). The Southbank Centre has warned of 'adult content', though Abramović insists this has nothing to do with her plans, and is likely 'British over-caution', based on her previous, often risque exploits. Even Levit seems unaware of what she has in store. 'I cannot say what will happen, except you can expect me to be there and start playing,' he says. 'Maybe it's going to be dreadful. Maybe I will realise that I can only do it alone. And maybe it's going to be the most fantastic thing ever. Who knows?' And what if he needs to pee? 'I have a screen which goes up around the area of the piano,' says Abramović. 'And his seat can turn into a bed, so that he can lie next to the piano for 10 or 15 minutes if he needs to. There will be two assistants, one each side of the stage, who can wipe his brow or bring him food and drink. If they get any sign from him that he needs anything, they'll be there. But Igor will never leave the stage, ever,' she says firmly. She describes the performance as a study in being in the present. 'If you start talking about how much time has passed, and how much time is in the future, you've lost the concept. Igor has to be there now, in the space where there is no time, and the public has to go into that space. It is the same thing that happens when you count rice. 'You're going to go completely to another level of time, consciousness and experience.' Will she be on stage? 'I'm introducing the piece, and then I'll be in the public, but I will not be babysitting him.' Born in the Russian city of Gorki in 1987, Levit grew up in Hanover, northern Germany. His intensity and doughtiness as a performer and as an often outspoken political campaigner have earned him global acclaim and respect, but he has pulled back from social media in recent years after death threats and many antisemitic attacks. He says he's no less passionate about the issues that move him (refugees, Ukraine, Israel) but feels the necessity to concentrate on piano playing. 'The darker the world gets, the more I'd like to be the pianist that I am, and the more art we should create, the more music we should make. It is literally a tool of mental and emotional survival. For me, at least, I can say it becomes more and more existential.' 'In my world, which is pushing down keys in black and white, creating sound, creating noise, playing melodies and sharing this with other people, there is no war, no cynicism, no power games – at least not in a bad way. There is, in the best case, transcendence, so there's a reason to live in my world, and I would like to share this.' Abramović agrees. 'If you spend your time looking at television, listening to the news, this horrible, ugly face of Donald Trump all the time, [or with] the diarrhoea of social media, you're really lost. You have to create your own sense of peace in yourself.' But why is Levit prepared to put himself through such a potentially gruelling experience for a piece of music that he admits it is hard to be passionate about? 'It's not about reaching a goal. I've never cared for goals. I am a process person,' he says. 'And so my answer, from the bottom of my heart, is because I can, and because I want to, and because I need it. I have the chance to do it with this beautiful lady, and we have been given the space. The main answer is just because. Full stop. That's it.' Vexations is at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London on 24-25 April
The Guardian
13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by Ian Penman review – the radical lord of light entertainent
Music is extremely difficult to write about. First, because it has no plot, no figures, no images, and second, because it is, as the critic Walter Pater pointed out, the one artform to which all the others aspire. Remember those earnest mini-essays on the backs of album covers, which told us everything and nothing about the piece or pieces we were about to listen to? Ian Penman writes: 'As with sex, we inherit a certain language to talk about music which only glancingly reflects how much of it really makes us feel.' Penman, a journalist, critic and biographer, has written not only for the London Review of Books but also the New Musical Express. To say that he is eclectic in his tastes is an understatement; he gives the same level of consideration to Burt Bacharach as he does to Bach, and along the way puts in a word for the genius of the likes of Les Dawson – that's right, Les Dawson. If Penman's cheery chappiness can at times seem studied, he is for the most part admirably accommodating and affirmative, and always enthusiastic. He has little time for the grand Germanic musical statements of the 19th century, which Erik Satie and Debussy gigglingly referred to as Sauerkraut. Satie is an ideal subject for him, and Three Piece Suite is, as you would expect, a glorious celebration of this most elusive and ambiguous of early 20th-century composers. Satie was born in 1866 to a French father and a British mother. He studied first at the Paris Conservatoire but left without a diploma; later, he enrolled at the Schola Cantorum and was more successful. For a time he played the piano in a Montmartre cabaret. He had a five-month liaison with the trapeze artist and painter Suzanne Valadon, but lived for the latter part of his life alone in a small and extremely cluttered room in the Paris suburb of Arcueil, making frequent forays into the city, where he became a well-known figure in cultural circles that included Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, Darius Milhaud and Jean Cocteau. He was a true eccentric, instantly recognisable for his neat grey suits, bowler hat and inveterate umbrella. One Paris wag nicknamed him Esotérik Satie. He drank a great deal, and died of cirrhosis when he was 59. His last words were, so Penman reports, 'Ah! The cows …' He composed mostly miniatures, especially for the piano, his best-known pieces being the Gymnopédies and the Gnossiennes – 'They feel as old as sand,' Penman beautifully writes, 'but strangely contemporary' – but also wrote what he called a symphonic drama, Socrate, commissioned by Princess Edmond de Polignac, and two late ballets. Penman loves him for his light and humorous touch – 'What's the big problem with happiness?' – and for the depths he managed to plumb by way of seeming superficiality. Penman situates Satie among the proto-surrealists, along with René Clair and Francis Picabia – 'the three amigos' – but distances him from the likes of André Breton, he of the 'pursed lips and castigating impulse'. The amigos 'proved that it was possible to be radical and lighthearted at the same time'. However, Satie was at heart solitary – solitary, that is, in the midst of the social whirl. At Arcueil he organised public concerts, took groups of schoolchildren on Thursday afternoon outings, and was, Penman notes, 'made a superintendent of the Patronage laïque of Arceuil-Cachan and honoured with a decoration called the Palmes Académiques for services to the community'. Yet the music, despite its apparent simplicity and sunny surfaces, turns upon inwardness. All true art is enigmatic, but the art of Satie is an enigma hiding in plain sight. His 'furniture music', musique d'ameublement, the composer himself wrote, 'will be part of the noises of the environment… I think of it as melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks at dinner, not dominating them, not imposing itself'. Not to impose: it could be Satie's musical motto. Disconcertingly, the audiences refused to ignore the furniture. Milhaud reported after one performance: 'It was no use Satie shouting: 'Talk, for heaven's sake! Move around! Don't listen!' They kept quiet. They listened.' But was Satie displeased, really? Was there not here a joke within a joke, a blague within a blague? Penman associates Satie not only with later composers upon whom he could be said to have had an influence, such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams, even Morton Feldman, but also with artists in other forms, the novelist Raymond Queneau, for instance, the choreographer Merce Cunningham and, of course, the painter René Magritte – in the 'Satie A-Z' section of the book there is a telling cross reference: 'See also: BOWLER HAT; MAGRITTE; UMBRELLA.' One remarkable aspect of Three Piece Suite is that in its more than 200 pages there is not a single word of adverse criticism of its subject. Ian Penman is of an unfailingly cheerful disposition, which makes his book a delight to read, but you cannot but wonder if he never finds himself even a teeny bit exasperated by Satie's relentless whimsy, by titles such as Sketches and Exasperations of a Big Wooden Dummy or Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear, and references in the scores to the likes of 'Turkish Yodelling (To be played with the tips of the eyes)'. All the same, who could resist a work of musical criticism that closes with the diary entry '10.8.24. Such a lovely blue sky today'? Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by Ian Penman is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy from Delivery charges may apply
Telegraph
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
‘My mind was wearing away': what it feels like to take on the ultra-marathon of music
Next month, one of classical music's rarest monsters will be heard on the stage of London's Southbank Centre: Erik Satie's Vexations. The famed pianist Igor Levit will play this extraordinary piece, which can last anything from 12 to 20 hours, depending on whether the musician canters through at speed or, more commonly, at a reverent slow tread. (On past form, the German will clock in at the 'quicker' end.) There is no work stranger and more extreme, nor more threadbare and apparently simple. It consists of just one page of music: we hear a strange, gaunt little melody, accompanied by disconcertingly ambiguous chords, which stops rather than actually ending. Then – as if that weren't austere enough – we hear the bass line of those chords again, followed by the same hollow-eyed procession of harmonies with the notes swapped round, then the bass again. That is the sum total of the musical material of Vexations. And yet this bowl of extremely thin gruel has become one of the cornerstones of cutting-edge music. For playing the piece once, as above, isn't sufficient. On the manuscript, Satie wrote in his exquisite hand that 'in order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities'. That note has been taken, from the outset, as an instruction to repeat the piece 839 times. Levit will almost certainly follow suit. Yet notice the wording: Satie does not say 'this piece must be played 840 times'. He only says that anyone who wishes to play the piece 840 times has to be spiritually prepared. Given his reputation as a joker, it's surprising more people haven't wondered whether this is a typical piece of Satie mischief. One imagines him in some musical heaven, still dressed in his signature banker's suit and bowler hat, tittering at our gullibility. After all, this is the man who once co-authored pieces he labelled 'musique d'ameublement', or 'furniture music'; such stuff was designed to be ignored, and at the first performance, Satie ran around advising the bewildered audience to keep talking and not to listen too hard. He once wrote a set of three pieces called Desiccated Embryos, which portray various species of crustacean: one piece quotes Chopin 's Funeral March, which is described in the score as 'a famous mazurka by Schubert'. And Satie loved to pepper his scores with silly performance directions, such as 'play like a nightingale with toothache', 'don't eat too much' and 'with great kindness'. But, no. Rather than take Vexations as a joke, posterity's judgment has been to take it very seriously indeed. On the strength of this tiny-yet-huge piece, Satie has been hailed as a spiritual godfather by all those experimentalists who placed a bomb under classical music in the mid-20th century. The best known of them is John Cage, who liked to quote Satie's dictum that 'boredom is mysterious and profound' – and went on to compose enormously long, aimless pieces himself, devised with the aid of chance procedures such as tossing a die. He wasn't the only one. The young artist Joseph Beuys loved Satie, as did Andy Warhol. So, what is Vexations all about? The most straightforward answer is that when Satie composed the piece in 1893, he was indeed vexed, and needed to get something out of his system. The cause of his upset was the painter Suzanne Valadon, who had started life as a circus artist and turned to painting after an injury. Valadon had become a denizen of the Montmartre café scene in Paris, hanging out with and often posing for the great artists of the day, such as Puvis de Chavannes and Toulouse-Lautrec. It was probably over a glass of absinthe in Le Chat Noir that she met Satie, who in the early 1890s was struggling to establish himself as a composer. He had already achieved some small fame with his Gymnopédies, piano pieces that had caught the attention of two more successful composers, Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy. They acknowledged their debt to his graceful 'Grecian' melodies – but with a note of condescension that the insecure Satie surely noticed. By the time he met Valadon, Satie was leading a strange double life. By night, he was a cabaret pianist, making the six-mile journey to Montmartre on foot from his austere single room in the south of Paris, stopping often for a fortifying glass of absinthe along the way. By day, he was a composer of strangely austere music, some of which sounds quite close to Vexations. At this point, Satie was in his 'mystical' phase, composing music for a peculiar form of Rosicrucian ritual led by one of Paris's many occultists, while setting up as the pope of a rival 'church' of his own. The relationship between the eccentric Satie and the fiery Valadon was over in six months. It's fairly clear that this break-up was the inspiration for Vexations, as the harmonies are identical to those contained in a musical 'greeting' sent to Valadon by Satie. Most men would mark a break-up with sardonic humour, or anger, or desolation. Satie, true to form, marked it with a piece that seems to leave all human feeling behind. But that doesn't mean it's empty. For a composition so seemingly thin, Vexations is rich in cultural resonances. The alternation of harmony and bass line reminds us of church music, and the ingenious construction from the scantest material is 'minimalist' before the term was invented. However, the actual inspiration behind the repetition of almost-identical harmonies may have been the clever-clever poetry – in one style, almost every word in two lines would rhyme – dreamt up by the cabaret poets with whom Satie drank. Lurking under the troubling, almost aimless harmonies is an extraordinarily strict compositional method. Almost all the chords are of just one type, and they're disposed in a way that foreshadows the 'mathematised' music of the next century. In short, this exiguous little piece is remarkably full under the surface. But can it sustain 840 repetitions? And isn't that an endurance test that would tax most performers beyond their limit? One common solution to the endurance problem is to perform the piece with a team of pianists, each of whom plays for one or two hours before handing over to the next. While one pianist edges gently off the piano stool, the next slides gently on, picking up those chords without an audible break. This was the method used by Cage when he organised the first ever public performance of Vexations, at the Pocket Theater in New York City in September 1963. Among the pianists were experimental musicians such as David Tudor and Christian Wolff, but there was also Joshua Rifkin, who later became famous for popularising the ragtime composer Scott Joplin, and The New York Times critic Howard Klein, who was roped in to play. Wolff recalled that at first the style of playing varied from 'the most sober and cautious to the wilful and effusive'. But after a while, 'the more expansive players began to subside, the more restrained to relax... the music simply took over. At first a kind of passive object, it became the guiding force. As the night wore on, we got weary, or rather just sleepy, and the beautiful state of suspension of self now became risky.' Stephen Montague, a London-based American composer and pianist, is a grizzled veteran of Vexations, having taken part in four or possibly five performances in the past 50 years. (It's symptomatic that he can't quite remember whether it's four or five. Vexations defeats memory at every level. Even after playing this little piece hundreds of times, pianists can forget how it goes.) 'The first half-hour is easy,' Montague says, 'but after that it's a massive challenge to keep one's concentration. It's so easy to forget whether you've just played the bass line or the first harmonisation, so you don't know what comes next. The piece is so simple, but it's actually very tricky to hold in your mind, so you rely on muscle memory – and that's always a disaster because it sends the mind to sleep.' Does he try to make his contribution sound individual in some way? 'No, I try to fit with the overall mood, which is what I think most pianists do, but the interesting thing is that each performer does sound a little different to the one before. Maybe adding something a little individual each time round is the only way to stay sane.' That's the 'team' method. But what about those heroic or possibly foolhardy souls who decide to perform the entire piece solo? The pianist Peter Evans tried in 1970 and wished he hadn't. He gave up after the 595th repetition, as he felt his mind was 'wearing away. I had to stop. If I hadn't stopped, I'd be a very different person today. People who play Vexations do so at their own peril.' Levit, who'll begin playing on the morning of April 24, is clearly made of sterner stuff. He knows he can pass the endurance test, having done a live-streamed performance of Vexations from his studio during lockdown. In fact, if anything, he actually seems to enjoy playing the piece. In 2020, before embarking on the pandemic recital, he declared that 'the sheer duration... doesn't feel like a nuisance or torture to me, as the title would suggest, but rather a retreat of silence and humility, reflecting a feeling of resistance'. Perhaps next month's concerts really will be a sublime experience, for Levit and his audience. But I can't help suspecting that Satie's ghost will be laughing behind one raised hand. Igor Levit performs Vexations at the Southbank Centre, London SE1, ( on April 24
