Scotland’s pre-eminent classical music star may be expecting her first child in May but her hectic schedule continues as she launches her second Edinburgh International Festival as the event’s director.
Violinist Nicola Benedetti has announced a programme that features a number of headline-making boasts, including the largest presence of opera for some years, what is claimed to be the most generous ticket concession plan in the event’s history, and birthday celebrations for veteran orchestral conductors with long histories of participation in the Festival.
Her pregnancy has forced some curtailment of her performance schedule – she had been due to play the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in April and she has also withdrawn from a July music education event organised by her Benedetti Foundation.
“Sometimes you can re-schedule and sometimes it’s difficult. It’s always on a case-by-case basis, but I don’t think it affects anything I’m doing in Scotland. I’m with the RSNO the week after next, and I’ll just have to slightly re-position where my bow goes!”
Audiences in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow will be able to see her play a concerto written for her by fellow alumnus of the BBC Young Musician competition Mark Simpson with the national orchestra, giving the work its Covid-postponed Scottish premiere.
Opportunities for young musicians are also threaded through her 2024 Festival programme, from the Opening Concert performance of Osvaldo Golijov’s La Pasion segun San Marcos, which brings together the National Youth Choir of Scotland and the Schola Cantorum de Venezuela at the Usher Hall, to the final morning concert at the Queen’s Hall in which bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff steers a dozen young voices, selected in open audition, through Rossini’s Petite Messe solonnelle.
Once again the Festival will offer a Young Musician’s Pass to Scots residents aged between eight and 18 entitling them to up to half a dozen free tickets, while a limited number of £10 tickets will be available for every performance in the 2024 programme. The Festival also boasts that 50 per cent of all International Festival tickets are priced at £30 or less.
“There is a shared sense that we need to make what we offer as affordable and accessible as possible,” said Ms Benedetti. “We need general investment in civic responsibility, of which culture is a vital ingredient. A country that turns its back on that is not one of progress. Although difficult decisions have to be made when cash is depleting, we need the input of creativity in all areas of life.”
Multi-buy offers include a 20 per cent discount for opera fans who sign up for three or more of the five featured in this year’s programme. The previously-announced Carmen, from the Opera-Comique in Paris, where the work was first seen in 1875, is joined by a new production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro from Berlin, and a promenade performance of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex by Scottish Opera at the National Museum of Scotland.
READ MORE: Edinburgh International Festival: Here is what you need to know
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra, which is in the pit for Carmen at the Festival Theatre, also plays the second of its series of Mozart operas under Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev with Cosi fan tutte at the Usher Hall, where the closing concert is Strauss’s Capriccio, conducted by Sir Andrew Davis in his 80th birthday year.
The BBC SSO celebrates the 70th birthday of its former chief conductor Sir Donald Runnicles at the same venue, and Sir Mark Elder gives the last concert of his 24-year tenure as music director of The Hallé.
The music programme also includes the return of beanbag seating, as pioneered by the Budapest Festival Orchestra last year, for a series of Usher Hall concerts, and features three residencies, by the Bamberg Symphony, with conductor Jakub Hrusa, Sao-Paulo-based collective Ilumina, and the Philharmonia Orchestra with three different conductors, echoing the practice of the Festival’s earliest years.
That list of events is a last hurrah for the Festival’s Head of Music, Andrew Moore, who leaves after over a decade in post for Australia, where he has been appointed director of programmes with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
Other elements of the 2024 Festival feature a whole slew of returning familiar names. In dance, the already-announced work by choreographer Crystal Pite, Assembly Hall, is joined by Aakash Odedra, who featured in the 2022 programme, and Brazil’s Grupo Corpo, who visited the Festival Theatre in 2014.
In the theatre section, Fringe favourites 1927, who partnered director Barrie Kosky in an acclaimed Magic Flute at the 2015 Festival, return with a new family show. The National Theatre of Scotland presents a new play by David Ireland about the journey to sobriety, The Fifth Step, and its founding director Vicky Featherstone is back at the Royal Lyceum with a Stef Smith adaptation of Amy Liptrott’s Orkney memoir about recovering from addiction, The Outrun.
The Festival’s contemporary music continues along the lines established by Ms Benedetti’s predecessor, Fergus Linehan, with concerts at the Playhouse and Queen’s Hall by The GRIT Orchestra, Chilly Gonzales and Magnetic Fields alongside indie favourites Cat Power and Bat for Lashes.
Festival 2024 is entitled Rituals That Unite Us, as Ms Benedetti announced in November of last year, thematically linked with references to philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s book The Disappearance of Rituals. That theme is sure to be reflected in the large-scale free opening event, supported by The Macallan malt whisky, details of which are still be to revealed.
The box office for this year’s Edinburgh International Festival opens to public booking at noon on March 21. eif.co.uk
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