Edinburgh International Festival 2016: a packed programme

Launching the vibrant yellow brochure of music, theatre and dance work to be seen in the capital this August, he said: “It is a consolidation of last year and part of an arc into 2017, which is our 70th anniversary. We needed to take what we learned last year and apply it, without changing the structure radically.

“So the core of the programme still remains orchestral, recitals and opera, but it is a question of trying to build out.”

Once again the Festival will begin with a large outdoor event, animating a part of the city. Following last year’s Harmonium Project outside the Usher Hall, the same partnership of the EIF, the University of Edinburgh and projection and light artists 59 Productions move round the corner to create Deep Time, which will use the south-facing elevation of Edinburgh Castle Rock as its performance area and Castle Terrace as the audience’s auditorium.

The work, which will be ticketed but free, will look back at the very beginnings of the city, celebrating the legacy of Edinburgh’s James Hutton, the father of modern geology, and the settlement that grew up on and around the volcanic plug on which the castle sits. Its music will be taken from the work of Glasgow band Mogwai, whose new soundtrack to Mark Cousins’ film Atomic is an already-announced highlight of the 2016 programme with two live performances accompanying screenings at the Playhouse.

That brand of “post-rock” music also accompanies dance company Holy Body Tattoo at the same venue earlier in the month, when Monumental features a live score from Canada’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The Montreal band will also play their own live concert at the Playhouse, followed a few days later by two theatrical performances from Iceland’s Sigur Ros. The presence of all three of those groups at the same event is believed to be a first at any festival.

Linehan’s other strand of new music in the Edinburgh Festival programme provides a platform to the music of Karine Polwart – whose show Wind Resistance, created with playwright David Greig and director Wils Wilson will have an 18-night run at the Lyceum theatre – Emma Pollock, James Yorkston, Martin Green of the trio Lau, and the late Martyn Bennett. Violinist Greg Lawson’s orchestral version of Bennett’s final album, Grit, which opened the 2015 edition of Glasgow’s Celtic Connections under the title Nae Regrets, has a repeat performance at the Playhouse.

The Festival also includes an Usher Hall concert by one of Africa’s biggest stars, Youssou N’Dour, and other performances at the Festival’s home, The Hub, include Edinburgh’s Young Fathers, France’s Yann Tiersen, and, from America, Sam Bean (also known as Iron & Wine) and Jesca Hoop.

The venue also provides a late-night home for actor Alan Cumming and his Sappy Songs cabaret, which has been a hit in New York and runs throughout the 2016 Festival, featuring songs by Kurt Weill and Noel Coward, Stephen Sondheim and Rufus Wainwright, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry.

The rest of the theatre programme includes a 400th anniversary focus on the work of William Shakespeare as he is seen elsewhere in the world, with a staging of Richard III from the Shaubuhne in Berlin, directed by Thomas Ostermeier, Measure for Measure performed by a company from Moscow’s Pushkin Theatre directed by Declan Donnellan of Britain’s Cheek by Jowl, and director Dan Jemmett’s French adaptation of Twelfth Night, Shake.

Swiss-born performer James Thierree makes his Edinburgh debut with The Toad Knew. His brand of visual theatre, drawing on clowning, acrobatics and burlesque comes from a personal heritage as the grandson of Charlie Chaplin and great-grandson of playwright Eugene O’Neill.

The director of the National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch, Alan Cumming’s one-man Macbeth and Scandi-horror adaptation Let The Right One In, John Tiffany, brings his Broadway hit version of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie to the Kings Theatre for a fortnight’s performances, and Matthew Lenton’s Vanishing Point company perform a double-bill of new show The Destroyed Room and earlier success Interiors at the Lyceum.

The National Theatre of Scotland renews its links with America’s The TEAM for new show Anything That Gives Off Light, at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.

Alongside Holy Body Tattoo’s Monumental, the dance programme includes Russian ballerina and Royal Ballet star Natalia Osipova working in the world of contemporary dance for the first time with a company that includes Ukrainian ballet star Sergei Polunin, and Scottish Ballet dancing works by Crystal Pite and Angelin Preljocaj. Akram Khan brings an adaptation for families of his solo show Desh, entitled Chotto Desh, and Kabinet K from Belgium bring Raw, an acclaimed work created with a young cast.

Linehan’s contention that his contemporary music strand is adding to the reach of the event is borne out by a classical music programme that is as meaty as ever. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra is very much to the fore with a concert celebrating the legacy of late Pierre Boulez, whose association with the Festival dates back to its earliest years, conducted by Matthias Pintscher, and the closing concert at the Usher Hall, a performance of Schoenberg’s cantata Gurrelieder with the Edinburgh Festival Chorus and a stellar line-up of soloists, that will be the last appearance of Donald Runnicles as Chief Conductor of the orchestra.

The Festival’s opening concert also features the chorus in the company of Sir Antonio Pappano and the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia with a programme of operatic and sacred music by Rossini, Bellini and Verdi, which is an ideal partner to the already-announced opening opera at the Festival Theatre, the Salzburg production of Bellini’s Norma with Cecilia Bartoli in the title role. The opera that closes the August programme is a new production of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte created in partnership with this summer’s Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, directed by Christophe Honore with Jeremie Rhorer and the Freiburg Baroque in the pit.

Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Opera begin a four-year series of concert performances of Wag-ner’s Ring Cycle with Das Rheingold.

Visiting orchestras include the Leipzig Gewandhaus under veteran conductor Herbert Blomstedt, the Minnesota with Osma Vanska and the Sao Paolo with Marin Alsop. The RSNO will be working with conductor Edward Gardner and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra with Sir John Eliot Gardiner. The Usher Hall will also see a recital by star violinist Maxim Vengerov and a night of Weimar Cabaret with character comic Barry Humphries as himself alongside cabaret artiste Meow Meow and the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

The Queen’s Hall recital programme include pianists George Li, Stephen Hough and Richard Goode, instrumentalists Steven Isserlis and the Amaryllis, Kelemen, Emerson and Danish String Quartets, and singers Alice Coote, Magdelena Kozena, Mark Padmore, Simon Keenlyside, Florian Boesch, Danielle de Niese and Patricia Petibon.

With a number of half price and £8 available to young people for most EIF events, Linehan points out that even the most expensive opera seats are vastly cheaper than tickets for the same shows at their performances elsewhere in Europe, and makes no apologies for the £140 price for the best seats for Norma, at the top of an egalitarian pricing structure.

“For those who are able or willing to pay, you are trying to charge as much as you can, and for those who can’t afford it, you are trying to find ways in. Our young people’s discounting runs to hundreds of thousands of pounds and it is very important to us,” he said.

Priority booking for friends and patrons of the Edinburgh International Festival opens at 10am today with tickets then available to everyone from 10am on Saturday April 16.

eif.co.uk