The gregarious and voluble new director Jonathan Mills unveils his vision for his first Edinburgh International Festival is a complete contrast with his predecessor as director, Sir Brian McMaster, Keith Bruce finds out more.

The gregarious and voluble Jonathan Mills, who launched the programme for his first Edinburgh International Festival yesterday, is a complete contrast with his predecessor as director, Sir Brian McMaster. However, they share one crucial characteristic: an unswerving conviction that the menu they have ordered is good for all of us.

Mills, whose portrait stares from page three of the new-look brochure, may need every ounce of that self-assurance, because this year's festival looks very brave in some respects. In December he told a gathering of London journalists (an interesting exercise in itself after the savaging he received from one of their number when his appointment was anounced) that early music and in particular Monteverdi's Orfeo would be at the heart of this programme, and he has been as good as his word. This year is the 400th anniversary of its first performance and, therefore, by Mills's measurement, the invention of opera.

Much of his first programme stems from that single observation and it means a focus on a cultural area - early music - not usually explored in Edinburgh Festivals or familiar to Scottish concertgoers. At its heart, however, is a tried-and- tested production of Orfeo itself. Specially restaged for the festival, it was created in 2002 in Barcelona by the Spanish dynamo of early music, Jordi Savall, with his Capella Reial de Catalunya and instrumental group Hesperion XXI. Savall, although he has not been seen in Scotland, is a genuine superstar of the early music movement whose joyous recordings have brought a vibrancy to period performance not associated with the more academic approach of English specialists. The production of Orfeo, which is being revived specially for Edinburgh, brings that approach to the stage. Mills yesterday described its setting as a "glorious arcadia".

Its authenticity is the starting point for a journey through the entire festival programme in which the story of Orpheus makes frequent appearances. At the other end is American Reper-tory Theatre's Orpheus X, composer and performer Rinde Eckert and director Robert Woodruff's contemporary version, in which Savall's viola da gamba is replaced by a Fender Stratocaster and Eckert plays Orpheus as a rock star.

Stravinsky's Orpheus appears in a double bill with Oedipus Rex in a concert performance by Ilan Volkov and the BBC SSO with the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, and the dance programme includes American choreographer Trisha Brown's response to Monteverdi's L'Orfeo in the UK premiere of Canto/Pianto.

Another path of that journey explores the music of Monteverdi's age and the developments that have grown from it. So the festival opens with a concert performance of Leonard Bernstein's twentieth-century opera Candide and includes early examples of the form by Vivaldi, Purcell and Salieri. The other major staged opera is the world premiere of a new production of Strauss's Capriccio, itself inspired by Salieri, from Cologne Opera with a stellar cast. Mills was candid yesterday that his coup in showcasing the production more than a year ahead of its German debut was the lucky break of his first year.

The early music theme extends across the three weeks of the festival and all the artforms. Vocal music by Monteverdi, Byrd, Taverner, Gesualdo, Palestrina, Bach and their anonymous predecessors is performed by a succession of the world's finest ensembles in Grey- friars Kirk. French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau is the inspiration for the spectacular combination of live and filmed dance by the Compagnie Montalvo-Hervieu, whose On Danse receives its UK premiere.

The theatre programme includes two contemporary responses to early operas with the Vienna Schauspielhaus bringing a cabaret take on Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea that splices the original with Cole Porter and New York's Wooster Group mixing Cavalli's La Didone with the 1965 B movie Planet of the Vampires. Among the music programme, which includes Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Thomas Ades with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and Mariss Jansons with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, there is also the irreverence of a tribute to Monteverdi by The Tiger Lillies, falsetto singer Martyn Jacques's group famous for their soundtrack to the theatre hit Shockheaded Peter.

Where the festivals of Brian McMaster always contained links and connections that were there to be found but about which he never shouted, the first programme from Jonathan Mills could hardly be more explicit about them and the invitation to buy tickets across artforms quite clear. It is that which must redeem the comparatively esoteric nature of much of the programme at the box office. The full line-up of civic dignitaries at yesterday's launch event might also note that the music Mills has programmed is contemporary with Edinburgh's great flowering as a cultural capital.

The unusual presence of the provost, council leader and culture minister also suggested Mills was urging us all to heed the lesson of Orpheus: don't look back.

Full programme details at www.eif.co.uk