WATCH: Pianist plays while massive glacier crumbles

Thursday, June 23, 2016, 11:07 AM - It's not the first stunt to get people to pay attention to the Arctic, but there's a good chance it was the classiest.

Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi performed a three-minute solo of his original composition, "Elegy for the Arctic", while drifting on a platform near the massive Wahlenbergbreen glacier in Svalbard.

Einaudi was waiting at Svalbard, a Norwegian island territory in the Arctic Ocean, to link up with a Greenpeace ship bound for the Arctic, prior to setting up the striking shoot.

"Of course the planet and our environment is the place where we all live, and I care about where I live," he told CTV News. "I'm really happy that we did this adventure together. It was incredible."

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The one-man concert was meant to raise awareness of the need for Arctic conservation, as well as put pressure on the OSPAR Commission, a group tasked with protecting the marine environment of the northeast Atlantic Ocean. The commission was considering a proposal to protect about 10 per cent of the area.

"The Arctic ocean is the least protected sea in the world, its high seas currently have no legal safeguards," Greenpeace says in a blog post. "As the ice cover decreases with rising temperatures, this unique area is losing its frozen shield, leaving it exposed to reckless exploitation, destructive fishing trawlers and risky oil drilling."

As for Einaudi's performance, the fact that is was just offshore of an active glacier was a bit of a challenge. In the video embedded above, you can clearly see bits of the ice shelf break off and tumble into the Arctic Ocean at periods, which Einaudi says happened roughly every 20 minutes during filming.

"This was the only worrying moment, because if it was a huge piece of ice, the waves would be too big and my platform would collapse," he said.

SOURCES: CTV News | Greenpeace