Philharmonia, Alsop, RFH / Levit, Abramović, QEH review - misalliance and magical marathon

“Let the music guide your imagination” was never going to be the slogan of the Southbank Centre’s Multitudes festival. Its 13 events offer parallel visions, intended in the case of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé (a shared project between the LPO and Australian dance company Circa I regret missing), not so in Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony: as that masterpiece begins to be freed of its Soviet-era load, William Kentridge shackles it again on his own brilliant terms.

More of that later. The redemption came in the last hour and eight minutes I caught of Igor Levit’s marathon performing the short sequence of Satie’s Vexations 840 times in collaboration with Marina Abramović, doyenne of time become space (★★★★★). She was at the door by which I entered at 10pm, responding with friendly energy to my surprised "hello". Then, the wonder within - Abramović's and Levit's vision, in collaboration with designer David Amar and lighting by Urs Schönebaum, of a filled stage and a giant mirror above it. Meditatively seated people on the stage are sometimes led, eyes shut, by an initiating companion, sometimes walk slowly on their own. Levit has music on the stand, presumably numbered iterations of the piece to let him know where he is and when to stop, which he discards intermittently to the floor around him (filled with sheets of paper by the time I got there).

How did he come to finish in 13 hours when the estimated time is 16 (at the first ever public performance of a work that lay undiscovered until John Cage initiated the premiere in New York, the Pocket Theatre Relay Team took 18 hours and 40 minutes)? I didn't see Levit's lockdown performance - clocking in at 15 hours and 29 minutes - but what made this shortest time possible was a creative intent which allowed him to ignore the injunction "very slow": twice during that last sequence the time was dramatically halved, dynamics from the brink of audibility to shatteringly loud and bell-like for the unharmonized theme, as if we were witnessing the equivalent of Bach's Goldbergs with their groups of variations changing the mood. During one louder passage Levit stood; his face showed the usual mobility. Sometimes he scratched his head or took a sip of water with the right hand when the left was busy. He describes the lockdown experience in the programme as "mostly a great deal of fun", During a John Cage weekend at the Barbican, I remember several members of the relay Vexations in the conservatory (I nearly took part but got cold feet, still have the music pictured above): BBC Symphony Orchestra trumpeter Martin Hurrell, who could also have a career as a stand-up comedian, doing an Eric Morecambe at the piano, followed by his partner, the BBCSO's orchestral pianist Liz Burley, achieving highly artistic results. This time it was all up to one man

Levit's approach meant that you couldn't do your own transcendental meditation, though at first I tried. He called the responsive shots, from calmness to involuntarily moving the body with his more visceral delivery. The overall experience was more like what you might get in Cage's 4'33", where the composer wanted an anything-goes response from the audience to three movements of silence from the concert platform: shouting out, walking out... As I chose to sit by the walkway, people came and went: some clomping on high-heeled shoes (especially a lady in a big white dress), others moving sensitively, some trailing perfume, others with the smell of cigarettes wafting from their clothes. At a quiet spot, a man behind snapped open a can. There was some low-level talking, a bit of coughing, but generally quiet prevailed. Only those who'd come in at 10pm learned that the performance was due to end not long after 11, which changed the perspective. In the mirror, the piano stand showed no sheets of paper; we were nearly there. A long silence, a rapturous reception, of course; "no encore", said Levit, seemingly still cool and affable. Weirdly, the Satie hasn't earwormed me since; Bach's "Erbarme dich" has been on the brain since the Passion experiences. Somehow less emotion was involved in the evening's Festival Hall concert (★★★), which began with Bernstein's Chichester Psalms because that's a speciality of his one-time pupil Marin Alsop and because it's 60 years since the Sussex premiere. The Philharmonia Chorus sounded like professionals as they launched into their "Urah, hanevel"s - with the big screen in front of what would normally be the choir stalls, they were lined up against the back of the concert platform, a good lesson for the future if you're looking for resonance The impact was less than usual throughout, despite well-turned lines, an excellent treble (uncredited in the programme) and the expected magic of the quiet coda.

Alsop isn't always the best of phrase-makers, so it was impressive to hear the Philharmonia strings so silky-dark and assured in the opening measures of Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony. Woodwind solos were all finely honed, too. This was a well-measured and perfectly proportioned performance, but time and again one's attention was drawn away from the awesome symphonic architecture to the collage effects of Kentridge's film.He has done spellbinding work for Shostakovich's The Nose at the Met and Berg's Lulu at English National Opera (so rich I went three times), and exhibitions of his work have confirmed a genius. On its own terms, not necessarily the music's, his premise here is strong: a museum of Soviet curiosities, puppet-dancers (actually operated by humans) with the faces of Shostakovich, Mayakovsky, Stalin, Lenin among others or else paper-fanned abstractions. The whirlwind scherzo is all footage, mass creation of art and then machinery. The third movement evinces a part-time Pas de Deux between the composer and the objection of his infatuation at the time, Elmira Nazimova.

And yet the horn-call which embeds letters from her name is also the opening of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. The unmistakeable message of the music at this point is a release of air into a claustrophobic marionette-dance. Kentridge doesn't allow for this, nor for the universal sweep of the outer movements. By pinning everything to the struggle with the party, and especially by quoting as well as representing Mayakovsky so often, the work surely belongs with any one of Shostakovich's more outlandish first four symphonies, especially the Fourth. It looks like the endless background-into-foreground of "Shostakovich and Stalin" will never end (the Aurora Orchestra will be perpetuating it at the Proms). Pekka Kuusisto's work with his Norwegian Chamber Orchestra on an hour of Shostakovich from memory with movement and striking visuals was a liberation; this took us back into the Lubyanka again.

• Further events in the Multitudes festival
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