by Edinburgh festival director Nicola Benedetti has slashed ticket prices, increased youth participation and added more “bean bag concerts” in a renewed effort to broaden the arts festival’s appeal.
Benedetti, a Grammy award-winning violinist, said the Edinburgh international festival this August would offer “a new manifesto for the audience” designed to make the event more open, affordable and immersive.
The event, which features classic operas such as The Marriage of Figaro, contemporary Brazilian dance from Grupo Corpo and singer-songwriter Cat Power’s recreation of Bob Dylan’s 1966 Royal Albert Hall concert, will include a range of price reductions.
More than half of the tickets will cost £30 or less, with £10 tickets available for all performances, and 2,000 free tickets will be given away to young people. A half-price ticket offer will be extended to under 18s, those with a disability or hearing impairment and neurologically impaired attendees.
That manifesto, she said, called for the international festival to “provide the deepest possible experience of the highest quality art to the widest possible audience”.
The festival, the longest running festival in the world, had to recognize that it was constantly competing for the audience’s attention with a “disappointing” array of often fast-paced entertainment on mobile phones and streaming services, she said.
Bean bags would be available at more concerts instead of stall seats, and tickets would be distributed among the musicians. Young musicians will be invited to rehearsals. To improve accessibility, greater use would be made of British Sign Language and audio descriptions.
Benedetti, 36, became the first woman and the first Scot to direct the international festival in 2022 when it marked the 75th anniversary of its foundation after the second world war in 1947.
It coincided with the cost of living crisis, the war in Ukraine and the festival’s efforts to emerge from the Covid pandemic; All three crises forced the city’s August festivals, including the fringe and book festivals, to reassess their roles.
She said the festival had to respond intelligently to the competition from digital media that has overtaken modern life and the algorithms that have polarized people, and also recognize that people have been affected by tragedies abroad, a reference to the wars on Gaza and Ukraine.
“My role is always to look outside the world of the festival and engage in today’s climate?” she said. “I believe you have to destroy your environment to inspire people to be less afraid of what they should and shouldn’t do within the Edinburgh International Festival.”
Benedetti said she tried to build on last year’s proposal, “Where do we go from here?”, by incorporating three themes discussed by South Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han in his book The Disappearance of Rituals. Those themes were: new rituals, the game of life and death, and the art of seduction.
The purpose of the festival was to provide an antidote to the “way of dealing we live in today” identified by Byung-Chul, she said. “It speaks to the importance of collective experience in binding us closer together.”
This year’s event, which presents 161 performances by artists from 42 countries, avoids direct references to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. She said the role of the festival is to “take a step back” and examine the root causes of the conflict with “calm, moderate, careful maturity”.
• The Edinburgh international festival will take place from 2-25 August; Tickets go on sale at midday on March 21.
Five highlights
Classical
Bamberger Symphoniker, an orchestra with roots in the 18th century, was refounded in 1946 by musicians from Prague and Bavaria in the ruins of post-war Europe, Hans Rott, Antonín Dvořák and Josef Suk.
Opera
Carmen, Georges Bizet’s opera about love and jealousy, will be performed in its original form at the Paris opera house, Opéra-Comique.
Dance
Brazilian company Grupo Corpo offers two British premieres, including Gil Refazendo, a tribute to one of the godfathers of modern Brazilian music, Gilberto Gil.
Theater
Vicky Featherstone, former director of the National Theater of Scotland, directs The Outrun, an adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s popular memoir about recovering from a decade of addiction, set in Orkney and London.
Contemporary music
Natasha Khan, the unconventional art pop musician and Mercury prize nominee better known as Bat for Lashes, has her upcoming album The Dream of Delphi.
