EIF Opera Highlights: David Kettle on the 2026 programme
Scotsman music critic David Kettle picks his opera highlights from the 2026 Edinburgh International Festival programme
The Galloping Cure There’s no mistaking the sheer ambition – even audacity – of the International Festival’s second staged opera offering (after Verdi’s A Masked Ball, see feature): The Galloping Cure is a brand-new work that tackles nothing less than the opioid crisis. But don’t expect a worthy lecture on contemporary evils: instead, composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek have repurposed a fable by Kafka about a quack doctor offering carousel rides as the cure for all ills. Mazzoli and Vavrek were the creators of the powerful, sometimes harrowing Breaking the Waves, which had its European premiere at EIF 2019, and they’re joined again by director Tom Morris and conductor Stuart Stratford for what promises to be a provocatively entertaining perspective on a devastating issue. Festival Theatre, 9-12 August
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Mozart’s Don Giovanni A Mozart opera from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and its fiery hurricane of a Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev has quickly become one of the International Festival’s hottest tickets, and if Emelyanychev’s The Magic Flute, Così fan tutte and La clemenza di Tito from recent years are anything to go by, 2026’s Don Giovanni should be vivid, vibrant and thrillingly alive. Emelyanychev and the orchestra have a strong cast for Mozart’s tale of seduction, murder and devilish comeuppance. Charismatic German baritone Konstantin Krimmel is sure to make for a complex, conflicted Don, while leading British lyric soprano Louise Alder sings Donna Anna, and veteran bass Brindley Sherratt is undeniably luxury casting as the Commendatore. Usher Hall, 16 August
Strauss’s Elektra If Mozart conveyed profound emotion through (generally speaking) elegance, charm and restraint, then Richard Strauss threw everything he had at the ancient myth of grief and bloody vengeance that circles around Elektra, her brother Orest, and their murderous mother Klytämnestra. No wonder the opera has quite the reputation: with a massive orchestra, brutally effective music and unremitting psychological intensity, it grabs you hard and seldom lets up. Fast-rising US conductor Karina Canellakis goes big on emotional impact: she leads the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, with a strong cast including dramatic sopranos Ingela Brimberg and Nine Stemme (above) as the warring daughter and mother. Usher Hall, 23 August
Death of Gesualdo Not quite an opera in the strictest sense, maybe, though this “multi-media concert piece” directed by Bill Barclay – former director of music at Shakespeare’s Globe – brings together music, acting, choreography, staging and even puppetry to tell the gruesome story of Carlo Gesualdo, Renaissance prince, musical visionary and notorious murderer. Gesualdo defied musical conventions to produce some of the most expressive – and most unsettlingly dissonant – choral music of his times, and as a nobleman escaped punishment for the murder of his wife and her lover in 1590. The production’s music comes courtesy of crack sextet the Gesualdo Six, including the haunting Tenebrae Responsories in which the composer seems to spookily anticipate his own death. Queen’s Hall, 15 August
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