EIF 2026 first look: David Kettle on opera & classical music
The EIF’s opera and classical music strands offer a complex, contradictory vision of America in all its messy glory, writes David Kettle
Context will surely be everything with large swathes of the Edinburgh International Festival’s 2026 programme. How much further America has plummeted towards darkness will no doubt cast a threatening shadow over the festival’s attempt to provide a complex, contradictory corrective vision of the country in all its messy glory.
That even reaches into the rarified realms of the classical programme: the flagship opera offering is opioid-crisis-themed The Galloping Cure by US composer Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek (whose Breaking the Waves impressed back in 2019), while even Verdi’s A Masked Ball looks set to throw a few barbed darts at US political machinations in a production set in Gilded-Age Boston from director Adele Thomas and Zurich Opera.
Likewise, whether the festival’s Usher Hall opener All Rise – the jazz symphony from Wynton Marsalis that offers a distinctly multicultural, multi-genre celebration of joyful US contradictions – will feel like an alternative vision of America or a portrait of a lost world is probably open to question. But the Festival’s bold American-themed ambitions are nothing if not praiseworthy – from a three-concert residency from the LA Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel (including Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz’s feminist-themed Revolución diamantina) to exceptional cellist Alisa Weilerstein’s complete Bach cello suites to a brand new piece by Steve Reich from the Colin Currie Group.
American material aside, it’s a breathtakingly rich programme, from a two-concert residency from the Berlin Philharmonic to visits from Víkingur Ólafsson, Sheku Kanneh-Mason and Yuja Wang, plus a three-concert tribute to Alfred Brendel from fellow pianists Steven Osborne, Paul Lewis and Pierre-Laurent Aimard.
Focusing more locally, two new Scottish-based projects look especially intriguing: John Butt’s extraordinary Dunedin Consort brings period-performance insight to Tansy Davies’s Passion of Mary Magdalene, while Scottish smallpipes pioneer Brìghde Chaimbeul teams up with the Scottish Ensemble for a new film/music show exploring Celtic mythology.
The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today
Want the latest Scottish headlines sent directly to your phone? Sign up to our new WhatsApp channel here
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.