The Veil of the Temple – powerful expressive talents on display in eight-hour choral epic

The opening concert of this year’s Edinburgh international festival saw conductor Sofi Jeannin put in a remarkable shift marshalling combined choirs

The annual new year concert of Handel’s three-hour Messiah is, for some, an endurance test that requires a sustaining picnic-hamper, so it was bold of the director of the Edinburgh international festival, Nicola Benedetti, to open this year’s programme with the full eight-hour version of John Tavener’s choral epic The Veil of the Temple, performed just once in its entirety since it was written a little over two decades ago.

The hero of those hours was Swedish conductor Sofi Jeannin, best known in the UK for her work with the BBC Singers, and here marshalling the combined forces of the Monteverdi Choir, National Youth Choir of Scotland, and the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, which has a packed diary for its 60th anniversary year.

Jeannin put in a remarkable shift, staying on top of every detail of the spare instrumental score as well as building the remarkable edifice that the combined choirs eventually become. The Usher Hall organ, Indian harmonium, Tibetan temple horn and percussionists from the Royal Scottish National Orchestra were fellow travellers on that journey, the latter joined by horn, brass and timpani colleagues for the work’s climactic eighth cycle.

Those sections recycle the same textual material so that a work that initially seemed fragmentary made compelling, if relentless, sense by the time the audience reached the first 10-minute snack-and-comfort break after a couple of hours.

Each cycle began with a promenading soprano soloist and duduk astern reed instrument obbligato, the most appealing choral music set The Lord’s Prayer, adding a line or two of text to each succeeding incarnation and most melodically expressed in English, although alternately sung in the work’s other languages, including Greek, Aramaic and Sanskrit.

Many of the recitatives, by contrast, were delivered on one note, and it was a testament to the expressive talents of soloists including bass-baritone Florian Störtz, delivering the Gospel words of Christ, and tenor Hugo Hymas, that they made those sections, often 15 minutes long, so powerful.

For all the quality of the step-out soloists from the Monteverdi Choir and the Festival Chorus, it was the vocal ensemble, using the three choirs in different combinations, that provided the work’s highlights, and where the National Youth Choir of Scotland especially shone, particularly in the sustained high soprano singing.

The first of this festival’s concerts with beanbag seating in the stalls, the staging by Thomas Guthrie – frontman of the 2024 programme’s The Alehouse Sessions in the same space – used the entire building brilliantly for Tavener’s ritual epic.