Edinburgh International Festival Launch
EIF Launch, 4/3/25 (embargoed until 12 noon on 13/3/25)
A Festival without an opera in its opera house!
This, for me, was the headline behind the launch of the Festival programme on March 4th (embargoed till March 13th). The Edinburgh Festival, whose origins lay in the opera house of Glyndebourne in 1948, and where since then opera has been a central part of its programming, will in 2025 have no fully staged opera. Even worse Edinburgh’s opera house, which we fought many years for and finally achieved in the remodelled Festival Theatre in 1994, has no opera production scheduled; it has a bit of theatre, a bit of ballet, but is empty for half the Festival. The only thing resembling a fully staged opera is an Australian production of ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’; however this is also a ballet, and a circus, and is technically too big to be staged in the Festival Theatre, so will be staged in the 3000 seat Edinburgh Playhouse, which most opera lovers regard as ‘a bit of a barn’!
There is also an unusual Chinese ‘opera’, ‘Book of Mountain and Seas’, which features percussionists and puppeteers and a Danish choir and is been staged in the Lyceum. The nearest thing to ‘real opera’ are two concert performances in the Usher Hall on the 9th of August. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra are putting on Mozart’s ‘La Clemenza Di Tito’ with quite a decent cast and conducted by Maxim Emelyanychev. It’s not my own favourite Mozart, but the SCO do Mozart well. On the 16th of August Tony Pappano, late of Covent Garden, is bringing his new orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, for a 3-day residency and will present a concert performance of Puccini’s ‘Suor Angelica’, with a full casting yet to be released. So overall seemingly sadly thin gruel as far as opera lovers are concerned. In discussion with the music director he indicated that the problem of not having fully staged operas this year stems from the budget constraints the Festival faced when planning the programme last year. Recently the Festival was given a 2 million pound increase in its grant by the Scottish government but that won’t come into play until next year when he promises better operatic prospects. Then 2027 is the 80th anniversary of the first festival with a prospect of even more opera. Of course there are many other good things in the Festival programme in the Usher Hall concerts, the Queens Hall morning concerts and the late night concerts at the Hub.
