Ticket sales for this year's Edinburgh International Festival are selling at a record pace.
The first day's sales for this year's festival (EIF) have topped £490,000, a record first day's income for public sales.
Most popular shows for sale this weekend included The Glass Menagerie, directed by John Tiffany, a new version of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte from the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Barry Humphries’ Weimer Cabaret with Meow Meow and the Australian Chamber Orchestra, ballerina Natalia Osipova’s triple bill of contemporary works, Scottish artist Alan Cumming’s three-week residency and a series of contemporary music artists including Sigur Rós, lead singer of Antony and the Johnsons Anohni, and the leading Scottish rock band Mogwai.
Popular tickets for classical music include the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and the Russian National Orchestra, with soloists including Daniil Trifonov, Maxim Vengerov and Mikhail Pletnev.
Choral concerts also featured high on ticket buyer's lists, with Rossini’s Stabat Mater in the Opening Concert, Elgar’s The Apostles, Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette, and Schoenberg’s rarely performed Gurrelieder.
This year’s International Festival runs from Friday 5 to Monday 29 August, welcoming 2,442 artists from 36 nations to perform in Scotland’s capital city.
Other popular shows inlcude Australian satirist Barry Humphries, conductor Herbert Blomstedt, ballerina Natalia Osipova, National Theatre of Scotland and The TEAM, Edinburgh’s Mercury Prize-winners Young Fathers, leading conductor Marin Alsop, acclaimed pianist Daniil Trifonov, Senegal’s most celebrated musician Youssou N’Dour and work by choreographer Crystal Pite.
Recently the artistic director of the festival, Fergus Linehan, said he hoped modern music was now an accepted part of the celebrations.
"I think it is normalised now, but we might find it is still seen as a big deal," he said.
"I think in popular music you do have to apply personal taste a lot - but there are definitely artists who are not following a set career, and with each chapter are really looking to say something new.
"This year it was it was clarified for me because we wanted to highlight Scottish music, and that gave us to lines within which to draw.
"There's a list which we could all write of artists in popular music who are doing really interesting things, not purely for the purposes of progressing a commercial career - we probably all have the same list, Patti Smith, PJ Harvey, Bjork and so on."
This year's opening event, Deep Time, will take place at 10.30pm on August 7.
It will tell the tale of 350m years of Edinburgh history in 15 minutes, as well as pay tribute to the Enlightenment thinker James Hutton, the Edinburgh scientist and "father of modern geology".
Although its main viewing area will be ticketed, Mr Linehan said many more people will be able to view the graphics and hear the music.
Last year's opening event - the first of its kind - the Harmonium Project, drew 20,000 people.
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