
Eight hours, 250 singers… and as many bananas as it takes: Tavener's Veil of the Temple
What about the longest single piece of music? Opera-goers may or may not sympathise with Rossini's quip about Wagner's 'good moments but awful quarters of an hour', but there is no denying the monumental scale of Die Meistersinger, for instance, which runs to about four and a half hours, not including intervals. And then there's the same composer's Ring cycle – about 15 hours in total, albeit split across four instalments; as close to a marathon as classical music usually gets.
Usually. But there are also a number of utterly enormous compositions lurking on classical music's periphery. Some are basic endurance tests. Clocking in at somewhere between 10 and 19 hours, Erik Satie's Vexations involves 840 repetitions of the same motif. (It recently got its first live UK rendition by a single pianist when Igor Levit performed it in collaboration with the artist Marina Abramović.) Others espouse what the 20th-century music expert Tim Rutherford-Johnson calls 'an aesthetic of superabundance' – none more obviously than Karlheinz Stockhausen's seven-part, 29-hour opera cycle Licht, for which one stage demands 'an orchestra in the shape of a face'; another, four airborne helicopters.
For sheer length, however, nothing matches Longplayer. Begun on 31 December 1999, it is a millennium-long work for Tibetan singing bowls. And also, according to its creator, Jem Finer, 'a living, 1,000-year-long process – an artificial life form programmed to seek its own survival strategies'. Crucially, its main performers are computers.
After all, very long pieces of music pose different challenges once humans are involved. Especially if there are hundreds of them.
The opening of this year's Edinburgh international festival (EIF) will feature about 250 singers in a performance of John Tavener's eight-hour choral work The Veil of the Temple. It will be the piece's first outing in the UK since its world premiere at London's Temple church in 2003. According to the festival director, Nicola Benedetti, the performance will be 'a leap into extremity and a reckoning with the existential'. Written in five languages, structured in eight cycles and 'representing four major religions', Tavener's work is 'ultimately a story of our coming together in the face of our differences', she says.
But what about the practicalities? 'There's a logistical side to the musical delivery that is quite something,' concedes EIF's head of music, Nick Zekulin. 'One of the biggest challenges is rehearsing it.' The individual choirs – the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, Monteverdi Choir and National Youth Choir of Scotland – all have their own rehearsal time, the headache is bringing together all the musicians with the staging, 'without having 10-hour calls, which you just can't do'.
Tavener billed the work as an 'all-night vigil', but even he was taken aback by the original commission from the Temple Music Trust to compose a piece that lasted an entire night. 'It wasn't my mad idea,' he said in an interview some weeks before his death in 2013. 'I thought I couldn't possibly write seven hours of music, but it just grew and grew and grew.'
The extreme length of The Veil of the Temple is a nod to the expansiveness of certain religious rituals – particularly in the Orthodox church, to which Tavener converted in 1977. 'I hope that the very long journey through the first seven cycles leads us to a peak of spiritual intensity,' Tavener wrote. 'The Veil of the Temple is an attempt to restore the sacred imagination.'
Thomas Guthrie is directing the work in Edinburgh – but he also sang in the first performance. 'There was a real sense at the beginning that nobody knew how it was going to go or what to do,' he recalls. So how did he prepare for his own long solo at 2.30am? 'Bananas. Someone told me they were the best food to give the body half a chance to stay alert enough to sing.' He giggles as he remembers the start of the eighth cycle, when he had to sing: 'Awake thou that sleepest' – 'and literally, you know, wake people up while carrying a candle'.
Steven Poole reviewed that 2003 performance for the Guardian. 'The overarching memory I have,' he tells me, 'is of a sense of time slowing and expanding until it didn't really matter what the clock said. The music was like the world: you were just living in it.' Does he have any tips for people planning to attend next month? 'Bring blankets. And show no mercy to anyone looking at a phone.'
Yet the EIF performance will be different from the premiere, for the performers and the audience: this take on Tavener's all-night vigil will start at 2.30pm and wrap up by a bedtime-friendly 10.30pm. Doesn't that risk losing something crucial? 'We felt it was a compromise, but a valid one,' says Zekulin. 'I think probably if this were on the festival's closing weekend, we would have done the overnight. But if you do it for the opening and you're expecting the audience to attend an 11 o'clock recital the next day, it's asking a lot.' He's confident this version will have its own atmosphere: 'The purpose of the piece is the journey.'
While Guthrie confesses 'it's a shame' to lose the darkness-to-dawn trajectory, he is finding other ways to create the all-important sense of ritual. 'Lighting, magic, and the music and that space on its own will carry it.' The Usher Hall may not be a religious space, but it has 'its own kind of spirituality – the shows, the musicians, the audiences that have been there before'.
For the conductor Sofi Jeannin, the main concern is stamina. 'I've never encountered a piece that lasts eight hours before,' she admits. 'I didn't say yes without blinking, because I needed time to think: am I the right person for this? Can I pace it correctly?' Unlike the singers, who'll have breaks, Jeannin will be 'on' throughout. Is she really planning to perform for eight hours straight? 'The closer we get to it, the less breaks I want,' she says, eyes shining. How will she cope? 'I have to look at when the musicians really need me there. I don't necessarily need to be very active all the time.'
There will be breaks during the performance – three short ones, Zekulin assures me – and audience members will be encouraged to move around, and allowed to come in and out of the hall as needed. 'We've even talked about having a couple of plants, as it were, who sort of create that little bit of freedom,' he laughs. The Usher Hall seating, Zekulin is quick to add, has recently been renovated and is now 'very comfortable. If I'm honest, I'm not sure we'd have done this piece otherwise.' This performance will also see the stalls seating replaced with beanbags. Seriously? For eight hours? 'They're not as noisy as we might remember, says Zekulin. 'They're high-quality beanbags!'
The Veil of the Temple is at Usher Hall, Edinburgh, on 2 August
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


The Independent
14 minutes ago
- The Independent
Why do men like Jeremy Clarkson get so upset at women playing football?
The old dinosaur Jeremy Clarkson claims he likes women's football. In fact, he wrote a column about it for The Sunday Times, saying he found the Lionesses' Euros final 'exciting'. Great! Progress, right? Well… not quite. Because in the very same breath, he compares that excitement to what he imagines he'd feel watching cow racing in Sri Lanka. Yes, really. His exact words: ' It was exciting – in the same way that I'd be excited if I were in Sri Lanka and the locals invited me to watch some cow racing.' It's a thinly veiled pat on the head – the kind of backhanded compliment women in sport have heard for decades. Clarkson's message is clear: well done, ladies – that was 120 minutes of fun, in a novelty sort of way. Not real football, of course. Just a quirky spectacle for a Sunday afternoon. And that, right there, is the problem. Because even when some men say they like women's football, it's often delivered with a side of snark, scepticism or condescension. It's not quite "real". It's not quite worthy. It's the football equivalent of a try-hard indie band – enjoyable, but let's not pretend it deserves top billing. That mindset – whether shouted from comment sections of newspapers or whispered into broadsheet columns – is why women's football continues to be met with hostility. And it's going to take far more than England's back-to-back Euros win, a Downing Street visit and a street parade through the capital to convince men like Clarkson that women's football is worthy of their attention. What are they waiting for – a Bank Holiday in the Lionesses' honour? Nothing has stirred more bizarre, irrational rage in recent years than women playing football. Not climate change, not taxes, not even unfixed potholes. No – it's women daring to lace up their boots and play the same sport men have dominated for over a century. The horror! Now, don't get me wrong. I'm well aware there are thousands of men who have supported the Lionesses wholeheartedly through the Euros and through the trials and triumphs of women's football. Those men exist. In fact, I live with two of them. But what's also been impossible to ignore is the other group – a loud, seething contingent who foam at the mouth every time women's football gets airtime. Let's be honest. Some of these men don't just dislike women's football – they absolutely hate it. Viscerally and irrationally. As though women simply kicking a ball poses a threat to their very identity. Take Graham (real name, I believe), a caller I heard on LBC just the other day. He proudly declared – without a hint of irony – that he 'can't stand' women's football. Not just that he doesn't enjoy it. Not just that it's not his thing. No, Graham hates it. He can't watch it. He repeated several times that he can't bear it being 'shoved down our throats'. Shoved down our throats? Remind me… has there ever been a sport more relentlessly marketed, broadcast and worshipped than men's football? We've had 24/7 coverage for decades, wall-to-wall analysis of Premier League games, live transfer updates (snore) that border on obsession. Somehow, that's just normal. But when the BBC dares to air a Lionesses match? Now it's an outrage. Another gem came from a man I came across on a well-known sports account on Instagram who insisted women's football 'isn't the same sport' as men's. It's not as fast, not as powerful. Therefore, in his eyes, it's a different game entirely. Let's unpack that for a second. Two teams. Eleven players per side. A ball. A pitch. A goal at each end. A ref. Sounds like football to me. The only real difference? Some of the players have penises and some don't. That's not a different sport. That's just biology. By this logic, does he tell his son – who maybe plays under-12s on a soggy Sunday morning – that his football isn't real football because it lacks the speed and precision of the Champions League? Does he pat the kid on the head and say, 'Sorry son, it's just not the same sport'? Unlikely. The moment you challenge these men, even gently, the reaction is instant and vicious. I dared to comment on one of these videos, pointing out the obvious: it is the same sport. Cue the backlash. Within seconds, I saw replies accusing me of 'rage bait', clown emojis and insults I won't repeat here. The vitriol is astonishing – and sadly familiar, if you've ever spoken up for women's sport. But it begs the question: why does women's football cause such a meltdown in some men? Why this sport in particular? Why not women's tennis, where the stars earn millions and fill arenas? Why not rugby or cricket? Why this obsessive need to gatekeep football? The answer is as uncomfortable as it is obvious: misogyny. It's pure, deep-seated and often subconscious. Men's football is one of the last cultural arenas where some men feel untouchable. It's 'theirs'. The pub, the banter, the tribalism. And it seems when women enter that space (and excel in it), it rattles them to their core. Here's the real kicker: the England Lionesses aren't just playing football. They're winning. They're one of the most successful England teams this country has ever produced. While the men's team continues to serve us heartbreak, hype and penalty shootout trauma, the Lionesses deliver us trophies and finals and pride. At last! And it's not just what happens on the pitch. Off the field, the women are widely seen as more approachable, less egotistical and, frankly, better role models. They play as a team. They show humility. They connect with fans in a way that's rare in the era of £100k-a-week Instagram stars. That success – both in results and in values – should be a source of national pride. But instead, a portion of the male population would rather die on the hill of 'it's just not the same' than cheer on the best England football team we've got. Before I get accused of having no facts to back up my point – let's talk numbers for a minute. The Lionesses won the 2022 European Championship, something the men haven't done. They've reached the World Cup finals. Their matches have sold out stadiums. They've inspired millions of young girls – and plenty of boys – to take up the sport. If you're still arguing they don't deserve the spotlight, then sorry, but you've left logic behind. It's a sad day when a country finally gets to be world-class at something… and a significant chunk of its population responds by crossing its arms and pouting. Here's the truth: no one's asking you to like every pass or admire every tackle. But if you hate it – if it genuinely makes you angry to see women succeeding in sport – then maybe the problem isn't the football. Maybe the problem is you.


The Independent
14 minutes ago
- The Independent
Ella Toone and Beth Mead share moving tributes after Euro 2025 win
Ella Toone dedicated England 's Euro 2025 victory to her late father, Nick, marking her first trophy since his passing last September. Following England's shootout win against Spain, an emotional Toone looked skyward and was comforted by teammates. She later shared on Instagram that a spare seat next to her mother at the final felt like a sign her father was watching. Toone also shared a poignant moment with Beth Mead, who lost her mother 18 months ago, dedicating their win to 'our angels in the sky'. Toone and Mead have shared a special bond during the tournament by supporting each other through grief and posed with their Euro 2025 medals.


The Sun
15 minutes ago
- The Sun
ITV accused of ‘cutting key Love Island scenes' as viewers ask ‘what are they hiding?'
LOVE Island fans think they're not getting the full picture when it comes to what is happening in the Spanish villa. Eagle-eyed viewers have accused show producers of editing the long running ITV2 dating show to allegedly hide the actions of some of the contestants. 3 3 3 The accusations came after the notorious Grafties Awards episode aired, as fans clocked how the women in the villa started to realise footballer Harry had been the one pursuing Shakira all along. Harry had long been coupled up with Helena, but they decided to split up on Sunday's episode, and he ended up recoupling up with Shakira, after it was revealed during the Grafties that he still had feelings for her. But now Love Island fans have grown suspicious of what they are being shown, especially when it comes to what the Islander women were saying about Shakira. Some speculated that the women seemed to overcompensate by blaming Harry after the Grafties, because they had bad-mouthed Shakira before the truth was revealed. One fan wrote on Reddit: "The Grafties showed multiple times that it was Harry that was pursuing Shakira while she kept shutting it down (or trying to)... I immediately had a feeling they've [the other women] been putting all the blame on Shakira even more than what we saw. "But my guess is they were even more trash talking Shakira on how she is trying to steal Harry, and it's 'all her doing'.. otherwise there was no reason to say this so strongly so many times. "What do you guys think? I like to try and 'outsmart' the producers by guessing what they edit out." One person replied: "I imagine they all kept thinking Shakira was the one initiating these conversations - when it was all Harry. But agree OP there could have been even more side chats on this for this to fully make sense." Another added: "You're so right! Why else say that if they didn't all blame her or had some misgivings about Shakira. "What people don't understand, sometimes very small things that aren't active bullying can make people feel bad and it's not something you can sum up in a clip like a mean comment... "These are all really small things you can't really put into a short clip but you actively feel it when it happens to you." After the Grafties, Harry admitted that he still had feelings for Shakira, despite being exclusive with Helena. Then Shakira ended her couple partnership with Conor, saying she had suppressed her feelings towards Harry. Harry and Helena ended up going their separate ways in emotional scenes. Helena was then picked by Blu to recouple with after the bombshell was brought back in to the villa in a surprise move.