Director says Edinburgh International Festival will explore creativity and cruelty in America | Edinburgh

This year, the director of the Edinburgh International Festival said it will showcase American art that celebrates the creativity and energy of the United States, while also exposing its cruelty and hypocrisy.

Donald Trump’s interesting second term as president makes this endeavor more important than ever, said Nicola Benedetti, a Grammy Award-winning violinist who is now performing at her fourth festival.

“It’s the largest showcase of American artists in the festival’s history, so it’s a huge, very definitive statement. Quite simply, this is the exact time when it’s perfect and urgent and necessary and perfect to tell the kind of story that we’re telling,” she said.

This August festival celebrates the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence under the overarching theme “All Rise,” drawn from the festival’s opening concert, a 200-piece performance written by her husband, Wynton Marsalis, trumpeter, conductor, and multiple Grammy Award-winner of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

American-themed events include a world-first collaboration between pianist Yuja Wang and the Marsalis Orchestra; San Francisco Ballet’s premiere in Edinburgh in 20 years that explores artificial intelligence; The Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra’s final performances before conductor Gustavo Dudamel withdrew; theatrical performances that investigate the AIDS crisis and racist lynchings; And The Clown Show – “a contemporary image of America as a run-down circus.”

In her program notes, Benedetti said these productions explored “recurring themes of freedom, innovation, creativity, leadership, cruelty, prejudice, perseverance and hypocrisy, which sit colorfully within proud demonstrations of the pinnacle of artistic and creative achievement.”

“A lot of these things could happen ‘only in America,’ driven by the friction that diversity entails and the resulting energy it inspires.”

Among its five world premieres and eight specially commissioned works, this year’s edition also features major events including a residency by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, considered by many to be the finest orchestra in the world.

The festival also believes it is the only venue in the UK to showcase large-scale opera productions from abroad. This year it hosts the UK premiere of Verdi’s updated A Masked Ball at the Zurich Opera House, set in Boston during America’s opulent Gilded Age, as well as an investigation into the opioid crisis with the world premiere of Scottish Opera’s The Galloping Cure. While Scottish companies present Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Richard Strauss’s Electra.

Along with the festival’s largest jazz program, featuring Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige Symphony, it also presents the Alabama Heritage Museum’s first outdoor exhibition, which examines transatlantic slavery and the myths of racial hierarchy, and a Swiss-Catalan-Mexican production that honors the enslaved millions with the early music ensemble Hespèrion XXI called Sea of ​​Music.

Marsalis, 64, who will step down as director of JLCO in 2027, said the current crises sweeping the United States under Trump are not unique; He said that the country had witnessed other unrest and racist violence. Many other countries were embroiled in similar conflicts.

“This is a struggle,” he said. “As I traveled the world, I noticed that people were suffering all over the world. Now, at my age, what do I realize? Damn, this is a struggle. And the struggle is not the way it is presented to you, right versus left or white versus black.”

“It’s a power struggle. It’s between a moral, civic point of view, the belief in lifting other people up, and the belief in controlling them and making them do what you want them to do.

“The question you always get is: Which side of this am I on? What am I willing to risk in this struggle? My whole life and career has been about ethics. I do not care how immoral any American administration was at any given time, because there were other immoral administrations.”

Canada’s Montreal Symphony will present Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s 1899 trilogy The Song of Hiawatha in its entirety for the first time at the festival, along with Voices of Canada by Grammy Award-winning composer Gabriela Ortiz featuring two new vocal works sung in the indigenous Canadian Mi’kmaq language.

The Canadian contribution continues with a co-production with Rwanda’s first women’s drum troupe. Contemporary music will include a world premiere collaboration between Scottish Gaelic small pipe player Brìghde Chaimbeul and the Scottish Band, and a late-night showcase gig by contemporary Scottish folk band Gnoss.

Benedetti said that art and politics are necessarily intertwined. “I would say categorically that they are inextricably linked; to try to deliberately and kind of separate them, when one art is literally the story of people’s lives and the other is the art of trying to help people work together, through systems.

“And not only are these things inextricably linked, but they both work best when they communicate with each other and when they are linked to each other.”

Tickets for the Edinburgh International Festival will go on general sale at noon on 26 March On eif.co.uk