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.
