The New York Times covers how to rip a CD to one continuous track - like say, for an opera - in iTunes: The songs you want to join together must be adjacent to each other on the disc, which should not ...

I've used EAC to do this. Instead of ripping individual tracks, tell it you want to "Copy Image & CUE Sheet." That will make a single WAV file of the entire CD, then you can convert to MP3 from that.