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

Who’d be brave enough to programme John Tavener’s choral epic? We talk to the team behind the staging that’s opening this year’s Edinburgh international festival, and veterans of its 2003 premiere remember the challenges and rewards

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.