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
