To perform Erik Satie’s piano piece Vexations, with its 840 repetitions, is an amazing achievement, but neither Igor Levit nor Ruth Davis was the first to do so in the UK (‘It is trance-like’: pianist Igor Levit performs Erik Satie’s Vexations 840 times, 24 April).
On 10 October 1967, Richard Toop performed it at the Arts Lab in Drury Lane, London. He gave an account of this to Gavin Bryars that was published in Contact magazine in 1983, and later quoted in David Curtis’s 2020 book London’s Arts Labs and the 60s Avant-Garde.
“Three things stand out in my mind from the performance,” Toop told Bryars. “Firstly, the piano was in the outer foyer, where there was an art exhibition, so that the music became a real musique d’ameublement. People walked round the piano, talked, and sometimes stopped and listened … Secondly, I remember a man from the Times kneeling beside me as I played … not even Rubinstein got that kind of genuflectory treatment.
“The third aspect was less fortunate; after about 16 hours I asked for some kind of mild stimulant in addition to the strong coffee I had been getting … what actually materialised was a cup of coffee with (as I only discovered later) a whole phial of methedrine [methamphetamine] in it.
“The effect was hair-raising: my drooping eyelids rolled up like a Tom and Jerry cartoon … The trouble was that my field of vision became completely fixed; each time I got to the end of the page I had to lift my head up and realign my vision on to the beginning of the new page.”
Biddy Peppin
Castle Cary, Somerset
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