Nine intensely long musical marathons

Think four hours is a long time for a concert? That's nothing. Here are nine musical marathons that will test your stamina to the max.

This piano monolith by the British composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892-1988) was the longest piano score ever published when it first appeared in 1930.

It’s an intensely complex piece that takes around four hours to perform. It takes most people about that long to work out how to pronounce the title.

The minimalist composer Philip Glass unveiled his five-hour, “non-narrative” opera at the Met in New York in 1976.

Despite having all the hallmarks of a 1970s fad – five hours of synthesizers, woodwinds, voices and dancers, no story, and no interval – Einstein on the Beach has recently been revived, and is hailed by some as the composer’s signature work.

The composer Morton Feldman (1926-1987) was preoccupied with the idea of throwing off the shackles of musical form. Instead, he decided to focus on scale, which meant extending his pieces in duration – big time.

Feldman’s second string quartet, for example, calls for your attention with no less than six hours of intense, quiet delicacy.

The late John Tavener (1944-2013) described his seven-hour work for choirs, orchestra and organ as the supreme achievement of his life. Its first performance in June 2003 began at 10.10pm with the blowing of a Tibetan horn, and ended just after dawn with scores of musicians processing out of the venue into the new day, chanting as they went.

The music demands a great deal of stamina from its performers and from the audience too. Many of those at the premiere made it through the night with the help of a van parked up outside dispensing coffee and bacon rolls.

Ever fallen asleep in a concert? This piece by Max Richter might just be your perfect gig. It's thought to be the longest continuous piece of music ever recorded. It became the longest live work ever broadcast in September 2015, when Radio 3 transmitted it overnight.

At eight hours long, Sleep is a work for which audience dozing is pretty much a pre-requisite. The music actively explores ideas about consciousness, unconsciousness and that lovely no-mans-land in between. Enjoy... until you drift off.

15 hours, nine gods, 12 mortals, three water nymphs, two giants, one superhero and a dragon: Wagner’s epic Ring Cycle blasts every other opera out of the water.

The Ring’s four linked operas are usually played over the course of four days. But in 2012, the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires gave Wagner obsessives the chance to see all four operas over the space of 12 hours. This effectively reduced the cycle’s playing-time to a thrifty 420 minutes.

This piece by the eccentric French composer Erik Satie (1866-1925) consists of a single page of music based on a single theme... and prefaced with the suggestion that it be played 840 times.

Vexations was never published during Satie’s lifetime, but 38 years after his death, the composer John Cage organised a performance in New York that lasted just under 18 hours. By the end, there were only six people left in the audience (and when it finished, one of them shouted “encore!”).

Speaking of John Cage...

The original version of Cage’s As Slow As Possible was a work for piano that could last up to an hour. The music moves forward every time a note is shifted or added, so it's up to the pianist to decide how long each note should be.

But if you use organ instead of piano, As Long As Possible suddenly has the potential to be very, very long indeed. After all, notes on an organ can resound continuously for any length of time. If a note is held down with weights, the organist can even go to the pub (or emigrate for a few years).

This performance started at a German church in 2001 and is scheduled to last 639 years. A date for your 2640 diary.

Dwarfing Cage’s piece by over 99 centuries is Longplayer, a composition for pre-recorded Tibetan singing bowls by ex-Pogue Jem Finer. This piece does what it says on the tin; it started on 31 December 1999 and is scheduled to finish exactly a millennium later.

You can drop in and hear it at certain listening posts, but don’t worry if you or your descendants can’t schedule a visit before 2999. The piece will start to play again straight away.

Radio 3's River of Music flowed from 9am to 9pm on Sunday 30 October 2016.