Vexations

At this, Levit’s first ever live performance of the work, you can bear witness to part or all of this feat of endurance, including an introduction from Marina Abramović at 10am.

In Abramović’s words: ‘What the audience is going to experience and to see is a unique event. They will witness silence, endurance, immobility and contemplation, where time ceases to exist. Igor interprets Vexations with endless repetition, yet constant variation. My role is to prepare the public for this unique experience.’

Vexations is one of classical music’s most simple, yet arduous and demanding, works. The one-page score includes an instruction to repeat it 840 times, which translates to between 16 and 20 hours of continuous playing.

In May 2020, the pianist performed Vexations over live stream to highlight the challenges facing artists during the first Covid lockdown.

Levit told The Guardian: ‘The sheer duration of over 20 hours of Vexations 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.’

Often considered impossible to play in full, Vexations has inspired musicians from the late 20th century onwards, including John Cage who rediscovered the score in the 1960s.

Satie wrote on the score: ‘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.’

Abramović is the world’s most famous performance artist. Throughout her practice, Abramović has blurred the lines between the observer and the observed as they pertain to performance.

This is a return to the Southbank Centre for Abramović: in 2023, the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI) took over our Queen Elizabeth Hall for five days of enthralling, site-specific long-durational performances, curated by the artist herself.

In autumn 2023, the Royal Academy presented a retrospective of Abramović’s work, and at 2024’s Glastonbury Festival, Abramović appeared on the Pyramid Stage to lead a public intervention, Seven Minutes of Collective Silence, with around 200,000 people in the audience.

In 2015, Abramović and Levit collaborated in a performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, where the audience prepared for the music by locking their mobile phones away and sitting in silence for 30 minutes before the performance began.

Performed and co-devised by Igor Levit, directed and co-devised by Marina Abramović, with set design by David Amar and lighting design by Urs Schoenbaum.

Commissioned by the Southbank Centre.