Pushing on through
All-night marathons Dusk-until-dawn concerts, if relatively rare, tend to be memorable.
This year, the London Contemporary Orchestra and conductor Robert
Ames staged a 24-hour marathon at London’s Barbican, including
Morton Feldman’s six-hour String Quartet No. 2. The Times’s critic, Richard Morrison, embraced the ‘trancelike meditation’ of the fare, then, ‘spiritually nourished… went out and murdered a bacon roll’.
For the all-night premiere of Max Richter’s Sleep in 2015, just 20 audience members were invited to pull up the covers in beds at the Wellcome Collection in London. ‘As silence cloaked the room and the soft piano chords began… I was engulfed by a sense of calm,’ wrote The Guardian’s Hannah Ellis-petersen.
The 2003 premiere of John Tavener’s The Veil of The Temple, a vast sevenhour piece inspired by orthodox vigil services and a host of religions, held at Temple Church in London, began at 10pm and ended at 6am. ‘At the end, in a marvellous coup de théâtre, the choir led us out into the dawn to a joyful chant from the Hindu scriptures,’ wrote Ivan Hewett in The Daily Telegraph, who ‘emerged dazed and elated’.