Festival’s highlights served up with French flavour
Major anniversaries are great. Whatever it is you’re celebrating or commemorating, you can be sure of bumper attendances and maximum publicity. But when you’re running a regular event, the problem comes the next year. How do you follow a spectacular?
This is precisely the problem facing the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF), a year on from the 70th anniversary of its founding in 1947. This is the point I put to EIF director Fergus Linehan as he was about to launch the 2018 programme – which runs from august 3-27 – at the McEwan Hall on Wednesday evening.
I asked him if this year might conceivably be seen as something of an anti-climax.
His slightly surprising reply, delivered with a laugh, was: ‘Well, it’s much nicer in some ways. Last year was hectic. There’s been more chance to reflect this year. opera was expanded last year. It’s more normal this year.’
and so it is, the principal elements being three staged works. rossini fans are sure to be delighted, with The Barber of Seville by Theatre des Champs-Elysees and opera de Lyon’s La Cenerentola topping and tailing the EIF at the Festival Theatre.
Between the two, The Beggar’s opera by john Gay will be presented by Paris-based Theatre des Bouffes du Nord at the King’s Theatre.
I asked Linehan if it was coincidental that all three operas, though not themselves French, were being staged by French companies.
He replied: ‘Well, I’d like to say it was a brilliant piece of programming but, really, it was just a kind of coincidence. It’s great to begin and end the Festival with rossini, though. Both works were written within about a year of each other when he was in his mid-twenties. But they are two very different pieces.
‘one production is almost spartan, set within the music itself, literally amid the curling stacks of rossini’s musical manuscripts. The other is just oTT, almost pantomime-esque, with the conductor pulled from the orchestra pit and swept into the onstage action.’
The new production of The Beggar’s opera pitches Gay’s 1728 creation somewhere between street theatre, musical theatre and opera.
It originally took tunes from the streets – ‘the ditties of the day’, as Linehan puts it – and is set to live up to that tradition.
on perhaps a similarly populist note, this year’s EIF includes a centenary celebration of the birth of american composer, conductor and pianist Leonard Bernstein. The Baltimore Symphony orchestra – under music director Martin alsop, a protégé of Bernstein – will make its Festival debut as part of the centenary celebrations.
AT the Usher Hall on august 25, 100 years to the day of Bernstein’s birth, the orchestra will be joined by Scotland’s own violin virtuoso, Nicola Benedetti, for his Serenade.
Bernstein was also a noted film music composer – and the concert will also include performances of orchestral suites from his musicals West Side Story and on The Town.
Miss Benedetti came to prominence when she won the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition in 2004, aged 16. This year, in something of a departure from the norm, the EIF will host the Eurovision Young Musicians competition. Indeed, in Scotland’s Year of Young People, almost 600 youthful musicians will take part in various events.
Continuing the EIF’s extended ring Cycle, Wagner’s Siegfried looks another sure-fire winner at the Usher Hall.
as far as dance goes, Linehan has continued with his relentless insistence on contemporary work. The highlight is likely to be Xenos, a new solo work by dancer and choreographer akram Khan confronting the tragedy of the Great War through the experiences of Commonwealth troops in the trenches.
It will, apparently, mark Khan’s final performances in a fulllength production. Linehan’s apparent obsession with contemporary dance over classical grates with many, myself included. I fear we may have to live with it. as he says, we ‘may never see a tutu again’ during his tenure.
Talking of which, it’s been announced, he has agreed to extend his contract for three years – up to 2022. Coincidentally, this will be the International Festival’s 75th anniversary.