Enda Walsh, the celebrated Irish playwright known for dark, troubling and manic works such as Ballyturk and The Walworth Farce, has turned his pen to an opera that will get its world premiere at the 2015 Edinburgh international festival.
Walsh’s first operatic libretto, called The Last Hotel, is based on a true story in which a woman advertised for someone to come and end her life. A married couple reply, and they all meet at a grim and depressing Dublin hotel.
The music is by composer Donnacha Dennehy and is beautiful, said EIF’s director Fergus Linehan. “It’s quite haunting. He draws on a lot of Irish traditional sounds and at the same time it is very arresting.”
Linehan was unveiling details of his first festival, following in the footsteps of Sir Jonathan Mills, who stepped down last year after eight festivals.
One of the main changes is that Linehan has chosen not to theme the programmes. Previous festivals have had overarching themes, including the Enlightenment, war and peace, and technology.
Linehan said his festivals would be “artist-driven”. He admitted that he started out thinking he could work thematically, but he ... “talked to a few people and the work didn’t fit in to the themes. I was in a situation where I was going to have to reject what I thought were really fantastic projects.”
He also vowed to “broaden out” the musical offering: this year’s programme will see gigs by Sufjan Stevens and a collaboration between Franz Ferdinand and Sparks.
Linehan, a former director of Sydney festival and Dublin theatre festival, announced a programme that will start earlier in August, directly overlapping with its bigger, brasher relative, the Edinburgh fringe.
There will be 2,300 artists from 39 countries. Artists making their first EIF appearances will include Juliette Binoche (in Antigone), the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, the pianist Lang Lang and the ballerina Sylvie Guillem, who stops off on her retirement world tour.
Theatre highlights include an adaptation by David Greig of Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark; the world premiere of a play directed and performed by Simon McBurney, The Encounter, based on the book Amazon Beaming by Petru Popescu; the European premiere of Robert Lepage’s new work, 887; and “a German commedia dell’arte” called Murmel Murmel, in which the only dialogue is the word murmel.
The festival will open with a free outdoor event which will have a digitally animated artwork projected on to the Usher Hall set to music. The Harmonium Project is about celebrating 50 years of the Edinburgh festival chorus, said Linehan.
Classical music remains at the core of the festival, and there will be 51 concerts and recitals, with conductors including Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Sir Andrew Davis, Valery Gergiev, Donald Runnicles and Vasily Petrenko.
The Austrian pianist Rudolf Buchbinder has set himself the challenge of playing all 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas over nine concerts in the Playfair Library Hall.
Linehan expects some people will want to see them all. “Have you met our dyed-in-the-wool supporters? They are a hardy bunch,” he said.
