Edinburgh International Festival: Rituals That Unite Us

The term ‘inspirational’ is often overused in arts and music PR. But this year’s Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) programme, comprising 161 performances from over 2,000 artists from 42 nations, comes across as a bold and ambitious attempt to revitalise, reframe and re-vision EIF for a new, challenging era.  

That challenge is both situational and socio-economic. ‘Locally’, so to speak, the profile of the International Festival has increasingly been marginalised (in a certain sense swamped, you could say) by the enormous and highly commercialised Edinburgh fringe – which many simply take to be the sum of ‘the Edinburgh Festival’ these days. The actual existence of a web of festivals throughout the year, and of the Edinburgh International Festival as the origin and core of the large and concentrated ‘festival experience’ in August, is easily lost.

At the same time, many of the art forms particularly championed by the Edinburgh International Festival – classical music, opera, experimental and new music, especially – are facing massive funding cuts and reductions in the kind of public support which has hitherto nourished and sustained less immediately ‘popular’ or ‘accessible’ work. Along with this goes all those cultural memes about ‘elitism’, which remain tiresomely strong in wider media representations. EIF has had to tackle its share of both economic constraints and cultural stereotyping. This year looks to be the beginning of a pushback based on expanding and widening its appeal and engagement, rather than simply accepting the logic of austerity and diminishment.  

In her passionate introduction to the theme, purposes and contents of the EIF 2024 at the pre-launch press conference this week, new director Nicola Benedetti – who was widely hailed as having a good inaugural season last year – started her presentation by returning to its origin story. The impetus for the inauguration of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 was a quest to renew the global and local human spirit in the wake of the catastrophe and inhumanity of the Second World War, we should recall. In a certain way, she hinted, that is the task of EIF now, too, in the era of an existential climate emergency, slaughter in Gaza, starvation in Sudan, war on European soil again, mass forced migration, and more.

In 2023, the overarching theme for the EIF was ‘Where Do We Go From Here?’. This year, after living with that probing but broad question from Martin Luther King Jr., the aim is to begin to address it situationally by focussing on ‘Rituals That Unite Us’ – something that draws on embodied personal and communal experiences of human hope and unity expressed in music, drama, dance, conversation, shared learning and special projects, including a first national ‘healing arts’ campaign across Scotland.

A core purpose within the programme overall is to investigate and experiment with different ways of bringing audiences and artists closer together than ever before, and to find fresh means of breaking down the barriers between cultural ‘production’ and ‘consumption’. To go for something primarily relational rather than transactional.

Music is once again central, both in its own right and in various forms of multimedia presentation, including a large-scale outdoor opening event from creative producer Pinwheel, which will seek to attract 10,000 people. As well as five operas (three staged and two performed as concerts), residencies from the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Bamberger Symphoniker, another residency from São Paulo-based artist collective Ilumina (founded by violinist Jennifer Stumm), there will be explorations of different ways of retelling our ‘great stories’, such as the Passion, involving a synergy of Latin American, Afro-Cuban and contemporary classical expressions.

Other features of the Festival include new commissions, the return of the beanbag concerts (where the audience can experience being in the midst of the performance) and Barokksolistene’s ‘The Alehouse Sessions’, in which Usher Hall will be transformed into a C17th tavern, replete with sea-shanties and folk favourites. One to watch for me will be ‘Fire in my Mouth’, a kaleidoscopic oratorio for girls' choir, women's choir and orchestra by American composer Julia Wolfe, itself an elegy for the 146 garment workers who died in a New York factory fire in 1911.

There is also Celtic music, jazz, Senegalese maestro Youssou N’Dour, the Scottish Premiere of Wynton Marsalis’s Trumpet Concerto, orchestral indie-band The Magnetic Fields, an impressive roster of established and new generation performers from across the world, Scottish Opera’s promenade version of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, Virtual Reality performance, and outreach in a whole raft of ways – pop-up concerts in NHS settings, workshops, discussion with performers at the Hub, workshops, family concerts, and a Youth Takeover Day for senior pupils in Edinburgh Schools. All that and much, much more.  

All told, the artistic and musical scope of EIF this year (2-25 August) is extraordinary, and it is clear that a huge amount of thought and effort has gone into a programme which both crosses boundaries and builds bridges, while maintaining the highest levels of performance and cultural ambition. Those who wish to snipe will of course find plenty of opportunity to do so. “Too much of this, not enough of that” is a game we all like to play. But personally, I found the vision and daring of what has been put together, yes, inspiring. I cannot wait to begin to experience it.