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.”
