THERE is no denying that the era of Fergus Linehan as director of Edinburgh International Festival looks very different. There has not been another chap in the post in the event's 69 year history who would have sported a rock'n'roll t-shirt for a photocall, as he did this week. (The garment was carefully chosen of course: merch for the soundtrack of Mark Cousins' film Atomic which our cover stars of last week, Mogwai, will be playing live to accompany screenings at The Playhouse at the end of next month.) Linehan was in the company of the Edinburgh City Singers at the Scottish Portrait Gallery for the shoot, another opportunity for the Festival to grace the news pages, in contrast to the previous practice of having one launch event in March and then letting us arts writers do our own preview thing until the opening concert at the Usher Hall got the programme underway.
The singers form one of nine choirs who will be taking the Festival from Haddington to Dalmeny, by way of Rosslyn and Longniddry, as well as to venues in the city (including the Portrait Gallery) on Sunday August 21 in an event entitled Songlines that is a successor to 2015's brass band fiesta, Fanfare. Having accidentally encountered that fine occasion on a beautiful sunny Edinburgh day on the Union Canal towpath last year, I shall be seeking out some of the Songlines performances on the road to the community singalong of Wild Mountain Thyme that will bring the event to a close at each of the locations at ten to five that day. It is to be hoped that the publicity it was afforded this week will lead many other folk from across the Lothians, alongside the vast throng of visitors who descend on Edinburgh, to put it in their diary too.
Like the Festival's outdoor event, Deep Time at Edinburgh Castle two Sundays beforehand, Songlines is free, but it originates within a department of the EIF that does not always come to wider public attention. The outreach and engagement work of the Festival is year-round, and includes long-established relationships with Edinburgh schools, with which The Herald is involved. The work of Sally Hobson, EIF's head of creative learning, and her team has produced some lovely projects in the past – taking opera in to libraries for example – and each year The Herald's team of critics make visits to Edinburgh schools to talk to pupils about the business of writing reviews in preparation for them becoming one-night-only Herald journalists at a Festival show, submitting a review to a deadline, the best one of which we use in print, with all of them appearing online on heraldscotland.com. The Herald Young Critics project was the initiative not of this newspaper but of Brian McMaster, a very different director of the Festival, and a man who may in fact not own a t-shirt and was certainly only ever seen in a blue suit when there were cameras around. I am not sure the arithmetic is do-able, but there are a now a great many young citizens of Edinburgh who have been through the Herald Young Critic experience, and one of the early winners, who now works at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, will be part of our professional critical team again this year.
Previously though, much of the work of Hobson and her team was contentedly behind the scenes in Edinburgh, and rarely stepped into the limelight alongside the Festival's big names. If Linehan has decided to shout about the less formally-clad side of the EIF, it is well worth joining in the chorus.
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