VoxCarnyx

Funding austerity has shaped this year’s International Festival, writes Keith Bruce

Politically-astute EIF director Nicola Benedetti prefaced the media briefing revealing her third Festival programme with an enthusiastic acknowledgement of the recent funding announcement from Creative Scotland.

It increased support for an expanded list of client organisations and assured many more arts companies of multi-year funding. Far and away the largest sum goes to the Festival itself, £3.25m in the coming financial year, rising to £4.25m in 2027/28, and Benedetti described the news that came at the end of January as “pivotal” for the whole sector in Scotland.

It did, however, come too late for this year’s Festival, which she would later describe as “more compact” than those of her first two years, and which clearly took shape in a restricted financial climate.

The black cover of the 2025 programme has a cut-out in it that reveals the theme the director has given to this year, The Truth We Seek, printed on page three inside. That gap at the front is, unfortunately, mirrored by the holes in the grid at the back of the brochure that everyone uses to plan their Festival-going.

A new play starring Brian Cox, Make It Happen, is the first event, at the Festival Theatre, but  after its run nothing happens there for nearly a week, until Scottish Ballet unveils its new Mary, Queen of Scots for four performances, which is followed by another four days with no Festival programming in the theatre.

The smaller Lyceum is also “dark”, in terms of International Festival shows, for over a week of the EIF’s three. Its shows include three performances in this year’s much-reduced opera programme, of Huang Ruo’s Book of Mountains and Seas, directed by the Olivier Award-winning designer of My Neighbour Totoro, Basil Twist. The other staged opera, three performances of an Australian staging of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, is the only use the Festival makes of Edinburgh Playhouse this year.

That makes for a lot of gaps on the fold-out venue grid in the brochure. The only venues without big empty spaces in their calendar are the Usher and Queen’s Halls and the EIF’s Hub home.

There are two more operas in concert at the Usher Hall, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and conductor Maxim Emelyanychev continuing their journey through Mozart with La clemenza di Tito and a residency by the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Antonio Pappano including Puccini’s Suor Angelica.

The EIF’s new Head of Music, Nicolas Zekulin, told Vox Carnyx that the event’s commitment to presenting opera hadn’t changed but the year-to-year reality always showed fluctuations.

“The opera offer this year fits in to what had been an ebb and flow. Last year’s was significant and substantial but the year before was less, so there has been a natural ebb and flow and I think this year fits into that pattern.

“Opera has multiple facets and this year has two unconventional productions, and sometimes those are the ones you want to show. The production in the Playhouse is about opening up that repertoire in a new way.”

It is the European premiere of the Opera Queensland production, made with the acrobatic troupe Circa, whose reputation was built at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This incarnation will have the SCO in the pit, Iestyn Davies as Orpheus and the Chorus of Scottish Opera, prepared by Susannah Wapshott.

In fact, as Benedetti noted in her presentation to the press, the 2025 Festival features all five of Scotland’s directly-funded national companies: the National Theatre of Scotland is Dundee Rep’s producing partner for playwright James Graham’s new Make it Happen and the RSNO performs both the Opening Concert of John Tavener’s epic The Veil of the Temple and the Closing Concert of Mendelssohn’s Elijah, where Scots mezzo Karen Cargill is one of the soloists.

Both of those also feature the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, which celebrates its 60^th anniversary with a total of five concerts. It joins the LSO and Pappano for two concerts, performing in Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony and the Puccini opera, and the BBC SSO under Karina Canellakis for Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms.

With the National Youth Choir of Scotland’s now-regular contribution to the Festival being that Opening Concert and one with the London Philharmonic under Edward Gardner and the RSNO Youth Chorus also involved in Suor Angelica, there is no shortage of local talent in this year’s line-up – perhaps a case of thrift, rather than charity, beginning at home.

Zekulin said that he was under no illusions about the realities of the Festival’s position when he took up his post.

“I was aware of the constraints from the start, and the need to be creative within a budget. Working within certain parameters is something we all do all the time, but this is an international festival so I still get to do amazing stuff – I can’t complain!

“What’s a gift for us with the recent funding announcement is that 2027 is the 80^th anniversary of the Festival. That’s a signature moment and works out well for us. We can look at ’26 and ’27 in parallel and think about what that anniversary means.”

Other musical visitors this year include residencies by the youth orchestra from New York’s Carnegie Hall, NYO2, and Poland’s  NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra from Wroclaw, with whom Benedetti will appear as violin soloist. There are also concerts by the orchestra of the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing, Ivan Fischer’s Budapest Festival Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Monteverdi Choir with the English Baroque Soloists and the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon.

The Queen’s Hall programme kicks off with the intriguing combination of percussionist Colin Currie and The King’s Singers and includes an equally promising programme from mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo, as well as more familiar names including baritone Florian Boesch, Benedetti’s former trio partners Leonard Elschenbroich and Alexei Grynuk, the Dunedin Consort and the Belcea Quartet.

Public booking for EIF 2025 opens at noon on March 27 eif.co.uk

Picture of Nicola Benedetti in the Usher Hall by Ryan Buchanan; Orpheus & Eurydice by West Beach Studio