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This year’s Edinburgh international festival will showcase American art that celebrates the creativity and energy of the US, while also exposing its cruelty and hypocrisy, its director has said.
Nicola Benedetti, the Grammy-award winning violinist now presenting her fourth festival, said Donald Trump’s explosive second term as president made that quest more important than ever.
“It is the largest presentation of American artists in the history of the festival so it’s a huge, a very definitive statement. Quite simply, this is the precise time that it is ideal, urgent, necessary, perfect to be telling the type of story we’re telling,” she said.
This August’s festival is commemorating the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence under the overarching theme of All Rise, derived from the festival’s opening concert, a 200-performer show written for the Jazz at Lincoln Centre Orchestra (JLCO) by her husband, Wynton Marsalis, the trumpeter and orchestra leader, and a multiple Grammy winner.
The American-themed events include a world-first collaboration between the concert pianist Yuja Wang and Marsalis’s orchestra; San Francisco Ballet’s first show in Edinburgh for 20 years which explores AI; the final shows by the Los Angeles Philharmonic before its conductor Gustavo Dudamel bows out; theatre productions investigating the Aids crisis and racist lynchings; and Clown Show – a “contemporary portrait of America as a falling-apart circus”.
In her programme notes, Benedetti said these productions explored “recurring themes of freedom, innovation and ingenuity, leadership and cruelty, prejudice, perseverance and hypocrisy sit colourfully within proud demonstrations of the height of artistic and creative achievement.
“Many of these could happen ‘only in America’, propelled by the friction diversity necessitates and the resulting energy it inspires.”
Among its five world premieres and eight specially commissioned works, this year’s edition also features mainstream events including a residency by the Berlin Philharmonic, regarded by many as the world’s finest orchestra.
The festival also believes it is the only venue in the UK for staging full-scale operas from overseas. This year it stages the UK premier of Zürich Opera House’s updated A Masked Ball by Verdi, set in Boston during America’s opulent Gilded Age, as well as an investigation of the opioid crisis with the world premiere of The Galloping Cure by Scottish Opera; while Scottish companies present Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Richard Strauss’s Elektra.
Juxtaposed with the festival’s largest-ever jazz programming, which features Duke Ellington’s symphony Black, Brown and Beige, it also presents the first overseas exhibition by the Legacy Museum in Alabama, which investigates transatlantic slavery and the myths of racial hierarchy, and a Swiss-Catalan-Mexican production honouring the millions enslaved with the early music ensemble Hespèrion XXI called A Sea of Music.
Marsalis, 64, who steps down as director of JLCO in 2027, said the current crises gripping the US under Trump were not unique; the country had experienced other upheavals and racial violence, he said. Many other countries were immersed in similar conflicts.
“This is a struggle,” he said. “As I travelled the world, I noticed people are struggling all over the world. Now, at my age, what do I realise? Damn, this is a struggle. And the struggle is not the way it’s being presented to you, right versus left or white versus black.
“It’s a power struggle. And it’s between an ethical point of view, a civics, and a belief in elevating others, and a belief in dominating them and making them do what you want them to do.
“The question for you always is ‘what side of this am I on?’ And what am I willing to stake for that struggle? My entire life and career has been about ethics. It does not matter to me about how unethical any given American administration may be at a time, because there have been other unethical ones.”
The Canadian Symphonique de Montréal will present Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s 1899 trilogy The Song of Hiawatha in full for the first time at the festival, alongside Voices of Canada by the Grammy-winning composer Gabriela Ortiz which features two new vocal works sung in the indigenous Canadian language Mi’kmaq.
The Canadian contribution continues with a coproduction with Rwanda’s first all-women drumming ensemble. Contemporary music will include a world premiere collaboration between the Scottish Gaelic smallpipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul and the Scottish Ensemble, and a late night showcase gig for the contemporary Scottish folk band Gnoss.
Benedetti said art and politics were necessarily intertwined. “I would quite definitively say that they are inextricably linked; to try to effortfully and kind-of-artificially separate them, when one art is literally the story of people’s lives and the other is the art of trying to aid people to work together, through systems.
“And these things are not just inextricably linked, they both do better when they communicate with one another and when they have a tie with one other.”
Edinburgh international festival tickets go on general sale at noon on 26 March on eif.co.uk
