Igor Levit is taking on one of classical music’s most daunting challenges — again.
On Monday, Jan. 27, the U.K. newspaper The Times announced that Levit, 37, will attempt to play composer Erik Satie’s vexing Vexations 840 times in a row, following Satie’s original instructions penned around 1893. The marathon performance, which is set to take place over the course of 22 hours, will be held at London’s Southbank Centre on April 24.
Tickets for the entirety of the event will cost £100 (or roughly $124), while those who prefer to dip in for a short time can pay £30 (or $37) to watch Levit perform for an hour at a time. Guests who decide to take in the whole show will be presented with a comfortable environment where naps are possible, according to The Times.
Those who opt for a set hour will be able to stay and watch beyond their time slot, but if they leave the auditorium reentry will not be allowed.
However, Levit will be facing more stringent conditions. The award-winning German pianist will be able to take “discreet” bathroom breaks, and have access to snacks and water over the course of the 22-hour performance. What he won’t be able to do is leave the stage at any point.
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“He will never leave the stage,” Mark Ball, the artistic director of the Southbank Centre told The Times. Over the course of 16 hours, additional performers “will start to pick the stage apart” giving “a sense of fragmentation, of collapse, of decay that’s in tune with the music. Audiences will see and hear the change of mood as he tries to grapple with all the complexity of the piece,” he added.
Few people have attempted to perform Vexations, which fits on a single page, to the letter of Satie’s strange instructions, but Levit is doing it twice.
In 2020, the pianist live-streamed a 16-hour marathon performance of Vexations to raise funds for struggling artists during the COVID-19 pandemic. He did the entire 840 repetitions on his own in a Berlin studio between the hours of 2 p.m. local time on a Saturday and finishing at 5:30 a.m. on Sunday, according to The New York Times.
Levit did take bathroom breaks throughout the event, but for the most part he was powering through the same piece more than 800 times in a row.
“There were moments of anger, there were moments of fear, sadness, devastation,” he told the publication at the time. “But these were touchable moments for me more than anything psychological. In the middle, I looked at where I was and thought: There are still 590 to go, what the heck? It took me about half an hour to get through that, but it was really the only moment where I thought, not that I wasn’t going to make it, but that I was annoyed.”
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