Edinburgh international festival is to mark its 70th year with a diverse programme which will feature nine operas, the world premiere of a dystopian play by Alan Ayckbourn and performances by musicians who include PJ Harvey, Jarvis Cocker and Benjamin Clementine.
The anniversary year events were announced by the festival director, Fergus Linehan, who said he wanted the festival to celebrate the founding values from 1947, ones which pledged “to provide a platform for the flowering of the human spirit” through a shared celebration of artistic excellence and cultural exchange.
Linehan said the circumstances of 1947 were different from today. “But there are parallels in how you respond to a crisis,” he said. “When we were thinking about this a couple of years ago, there was a sense that civilisation had been undermined … how do we find a roadmap back to that, a roadmap to human decency and some sense of humanity?”
The spirit of 1947 will be evoked in a programme which will see 2,020 artists from 40 countries performing in the city for three weeks in August.
The Old Vic, which performed at the first festival in 1947 with Alec Guinness in Ralph Richardson’s production of Richard II, will return to the city with a new two-part play by Ayckbourn, one of the UK’s best-loved and most prolific stage writers.
The Divide is described as “a darkly satirical story set in a future England in which a dystopian society of forbidden love and insurrection has emerged in the aftermath of a devastating plague”. After its premiere at the King’s theatre it will be part of the Old Vic’s autumn season in London.
Other theatre highlights include a reimagining of Aeschylus’s Oresteia in a production by Glasgow’s Citizens theatre; and a Scottish-Turkish collaboration which adapts Rhinoceros – Eugene Ionesco’s commentary on the rise of fascism.
Linehan is now in his third year as festival director and his mission to have more pop performers in the music programme continues. PJ Harvey will perform songs from her album The Hope Six Demolition Project; Cocker will present his Room 29 collaboration with pianist Chilly Gonzales; and Clementine will perform at an evening of music celebrating international cultures.
There will be an expanded opera programme to mark the central role it played in the founding years, the festival said. Productions will include Verdi’s Macbeth, which was the first opera performed at the festival in 1947 and explores “the corrosive nature of power when it unleashed”, said Linehan.
In the Usher Hall, John Eliot Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir will bring semi-staged performances of Monteverdi’s three surviving operas.
In other classical music there will be concert performances by the Filarmonica della Scala, the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and the Halle Orchestra. Soloists will include the violinists Nicola Benedetti and Joshua Bell and the pianist Mitsuko Uchida.
There will be much intellectual nourishment for festivalgoers but also lots of fun, said Linehan.
In that spirit everything will kick off with a free outdoor light show titled Bloom which organisers said would celebrate “the explosion of colour, vibrancy and optimism that supported the arrival of the international festival in 1947, and its subsequent cultural influence in Edinburgh and the rest of the world”. Linehan said it would be joyous and spectacular.
He said: “Everyone also wants to just have a party and I think that’s kind of the power of Edinburgh in August: this capacity for thought and fun – while we’re grappling with these ideas, we want respite from that.”
• Edinburgh International Festival runs 4-28 August
