THIRTY-seven pianists will play one of the world’s longest pieces created by an eccentric and heartbroken French composer.

The pianists will play all night long in a 21-hour concert in a bid to raise £4,000 towards repairs to a 100-year-old church piano.

The concert at St Luke’s Church in Brighton will begin at 7.30pm on Friday and run through to 4.30pm on Saturday with a range of performers taking their turn on the piano stool.

The performers will play the entire 840 repetitions of Erik Satie’s Vexations in a concert – a piece rarely played in its entirety and first played 70 years after its composition.

Tickets for the concert cost £7 but audience members can claim a refund of 50p for every 60 repetitions they hear.

Anyone with enough stamina to see the whole piece will be refunded the whole entry price.

Adam Swayne said it was a bit of a “fluke” how the church came into possession of such a prized piano which would normally cost around £50,000.

The church organist visited the Steinway offices in London in the 1990s when he noticed an old piano that had been donated by an East Sussex music teacher.

The company were unsure what to do with the piano so the organist agreed to take it off their hands and move it into St Luke’s.

Mr Swayne, head of chamber music at the University of Chichester and conductor of Contemporary Music For All, said: “The old piano is a great asset to the church, but it needs a complete overhaul - repairing splits in the soundboard, replacing felts, re-stringing the piano, regulating the keys, action, dampers and pedal mechanism.

”We’re spending £10,000 on the repairs but it will be raising the value of the piano by about £20,000.

“When the repairs are complete we will have one of the best pianos in Brighton.

“Concerts usually start at 7.30 in the evening so we decided we won’t make an exception for this one.

“However unlike other concerts at St Luke’s which stop around 9.30pm, this one will keep going ending at 4.30pm on Saturday when we’ll go straight to the pub."

A complete programme for the performance may be found at adamswayne.com/vexations.

If you can’t make the concert, you can still donate at crowdfunding.justgiving.com/piano-restoration.