Eight hours, 250 singers… and as many bananas as it takes: Tavener's Veil of the Temple

The Guardian

5 days ago

What's the longest concert you've ever been to? Ever found yourself sitting through more encores than you'd bargained for, worrying about your last train? Or mid-symphony becoming desperate to stand up and stretch?
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