7.25pm: Outside of the Chatswood Concourse, there’s a Christmas tree all lit up. (Aren’t all festive tokens meant to be taken down by January 5th?) Nevertheless, it’s mighty pretty, as are the sparkling pixels of a giant television screen overlooking the pool-cum-courtyard, which is playing some sort of nature documentary, including the occasional shot of tribal breasts projected from on high across the cityscape. (‘Tis the season to be jolly, after all.) This is the only the second time this critic has been to the Concourse – surely one of Sydney’s most recent arts venues – and it is the first time that the Concert Hall is to be graced with his presence (or vice versa).
7.30pm: The program for the night is Erik Satie’s Vexations, a one and a half minute piece (depending on the tempo) repeated seemingly ad infinitum, or, for the purposes of this concert, 84 times. (The score – the most mysterious and absurd score – actually says the following: ‘in order to play this motif 840 times, one would have to prepare oneself in advance, and in the utmost silence, through serious immobility’. I don’t know about playing it, but preparing myself to listen to it has involved nothing special.) John Cage, according to the program notes, piqued the interest of the Guinness Book of World Records by staging a full performance of the piece (taking Satie at his dubious word), a total of 19 hours in duration, with a team of pianists. The program also tells of one pianist who tried to do the whole 19 hours himself, but stopped after 15 due to ‘intense hallucinations’. In an interview on ABC Classic FM earlier in the week, the two pianists for this Sydney Festival performance – Guy Vandromme and Alain Franco – were asked how long the concert would go for, to which one replied, ‘it depends how fast we play it’. The program says 2 hours and 30 minutes.
More importantly, none of the audience has even been let into the Concert Hall yet. Second in importance, the program also says that ‘during intermission,’ we should ‘please enjoy a complimentary glass of wine courtesy of [yellow tail]’. We need only ‘present our ticket’ to get it.
7.32pm: The doors have been opened, and as I shuffle in, I think I hear music. Yes, I hear music. The playing has already begun, and I’ve missed the first repetition, as has most of the audience. Clearly this is less of a concert, and more of a performative art piece, one thinks. The two pianos are facing each other, yin-and-yang-style.
7.34pm: People are still coming in, and it’s rather weird to hear this uncanny music while the muted cacophony of voices outside is filtering into the Hall. Indeed, there are plenty of voices inside, including a group behind me who have been sat down for the past minute, yet still continue to natter.
7.36pm: Pretty much everyone is settled now. All is hushed. The music continues. It’s rather pleasant. One can only hope it stays that way.
The order of the day (or night, rather) seems to be that the pianists will alternate the playing duties, though it’s not as simple as one repetition to each. I can make neither head nor tail of it, but my guess is that Franco is playing more often than Vandromme at the moment. Franco is on a chair, while Vandromme is on the usual piano stool.
7.45pm: There’s a woman a few rows in front and to the right who’s having a coughing fit, and can’t stop herself. Her friend is concerned, but concern doesn’t clear the bronchial ways of irritation, unfortunately. And now she’s up, she’s up, and now she’s heading down the row and she’s out of here! The first casualty of the evening. My guess as to who will leave next is the backpacker couple on the left in the row directly in front of me. At least they look like backpackers. The woman has been fiddling with her phone for the past ten minutes, and they’ve been sniggering to each other. They seem German. I don’t know why I think that.
As the Woman with the Coughing Fit leaves, I hear the whooshing noise I’ve been puzzling about. It turns out that the doors, when they’re opened and closed, make a whooshing noise, the type of noise one would expect to hear across a sunny meadow. It’s relaxing, certainly, but it seems like a horrid design feature.
7.58pm: One or two other people may have left, but by George and Zeus’ beard, Vandromme has just up and left the stage! He’s scarpered off! Franco is still playing, though, but Vandromme is nowhere to be seen. Franco’s going to be doing quite a few of the next repetitions, it seems.
8.08pm: There has been one guy behind me who was breathing rather heavily – or snoring, as the common terminology has it. But he’s been rather quiet about it, and he woke up a few minutes ago. There’s certainly quite a few people in the auditorium whose heads are nodding (not necessarily because they’re tired, though). Every now and then Franco has a repetition that starts very loudly, as he thumps down on the first note, and the audience as one jerk their heads up and pays a bit more attention.
The repetitions aren’t radically different from each other, as one might well imagine – after all, the same notes have to be played each time. But there is plenty of discernible variation to the proceedings, such as a purely staccato attack, or a repetition dominated by a constant quiet pedal, or one that’s fast, or one that’s slow, or one that’s loud, or one that has staccato on the right and legato on the left, or one that releases the sustain at the midpoint of each note, and so on, and so on.
I’m not entirely sure if I’m enjoying it. But I’m not not enjoying it, at least. It is quite relaxing. It is quite… expansive. One has to go with the flow, as it were.
8.15pm: A girl in the front row just stood up and stretched, then sat down again.
8.25pm: Okay, that’s definitely someone snoring. While not throat-flapping, it’s a deep breathing in and out that’s been going on for a few minutes, and everyone in the Concert Hall can hear it. Someone behind me has coughed quite loudly once or twice, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s to wake up this inhaling-exhaling miscreant. I wonder if the pianists get that a lot, people sleeping through their concerts. Vandromme, for those of you playing at home, still hasn’t returned to the stage. Probably doing a crossword backstage.
Vandromme, it should be noted, has a copy of the score on his piano, while Franco, with his chair, has no score. What an odd couple they might make, especially if they lived in an apartment together. Sounds like a good idea for a sitcom.
8.28pm: The guy’s still snoring, and I’ve just realised that the doors are so well camouflaged and flush with the walls, that I’ve no idea how to get out. No, wait, there’s exit signs above where they should be. Phew.
8.35pm: Franco was turning his face to the audience, and for a moment I thought he was trying to bring the current repetition into tempo with the man’s snoring, but I think it was more just a signal to the lighting-people to bring the lights up after he’d finished, as it’s now intermission, though he’s still playing. Vandromme is still AWOL.
Now, as a critic, I wondered whether I should stay in my seat, to continue to listen for the next 20 minutes, but, having missed the first repetition, and so having no chance of any sort of satisfying completion to my listening, plus wanting to see whether having a glass of wine would increase/decrease my enjoyment of the piece, I left the Hall and ambled over to the bar.
8.38pm: A guy behind me in the queue is telling his friend that ‘lots of people were leaving’ in the first half, though they must’ve been seated behind me, because I didn’t see them.
8.47pm: Not the best chardonnay I’ve ever had, though not too bad either. I’m back in the Hall, and so is Vandromme. Franco’s up from his seat and leaning on the wall at the back of the stage.
I’m not sure what I expect from the second half. About the best thing that I can say about the first half was that I wasn’t bored – which is more of a compliment, musically, than one might first think, especially given the repetitive nature of the music. One remembers back to the Steve Reich concert at the Opera House last year, of which all the pieces were rather repetitive, including one mammoth 60 minute work. Reich’s music was certainly more enjoyable than this, however. More enjoyable than these, as the programs tells us, ‘sketchy diminished chords alternating in hypnotic succession, with brief melodic shapes drifting through the upper lines and a repetitive bass-line theme’.
8.58pm: The second half has started in earnest (the doors are closed, the lights have been lowered), and I’d say somewhere between 60-65% of the audience have returned after the interval. Including the German backpackers, much to my surprise.
9.00pm: Franco’s wandered off the stage, now that everyone’s back in their seats. Seems logical.
9.03pm: Another couple has left, though I don’t know if the wife necessarily agreed that they should leave, for she looked reluctant to get up.
9.15pm: Really, I think, one has to just let the music wash over you. It’s impossible to concentrate for this long on virtually unvarying material. It’s like trying to hold your legs out in the air in front of you for two hours – you have to touch your feet to the ground some time.
9.20pm: There’s no snoring, nor has there been any in this half. Franco’s back, by the way.
9.42pm: Franco’s lifted his hands off the keyboard, as he does after every repetition, but he hasn’t re-lowered his hands. Oh. That’s it. We’re done. Was anyone counting? Did they actually do it 84 times? I completely forgot to count!
I’m almost disappointed that it’s finished. Perhaps I’m experiencing some musical form of Stockholm syndrome.
And now there’s much applause. And some whistling, too. And I’m free, free! How fresh the air outside the Concert Hall smells, how refreshing the night breeze, how glorious is nature and urbanity in all its many forms. Free!
Would I ever see a performance of Satie’s Vexations again? No. Am I glad I saw it this time? Yes. Was I bored? No. Certainly I got a bit restless in the second half, especially as the pianists were treading on much the same ground they’d ambled over before, variation-wise. (Then again, if you gave me 10 boxes of Cadbury’s Favourites, I’m sure that by the ninth box all the chocolates would taste the same to me.) It wasn’t as painful as I dreaded it might be, but nor was it transcendent. (And that’s what I hoped it would be.) It was merely relaxing. I’d hoped that I would get in the groove, as it were, and be transported to an ecstatic musical plane, but this sadly wasn’t the case.
But in summary, do I think that Satie is looking down from musical heaven and laughing? Probably. But I doubt there’s any menace in his grin.
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Satie Vexations
Guy Vandromme (piano), Alain Franco (piano)
Erik Satie – Vexations
Concert Hall, Chatswood Concourse
9 January
Sydney Festival 2013
www.sydneyfestival.org
5 – 27 January
