EIF 2026 - some reflections
My first Edinburgh Festival was over 60 years ago and while I haven’t attended every year since I can say I have a fair idea of the successes and failures over the years and I think I can proclaim that this year’s festival was a success! When I attended the festival’s press launch in March and approached Nicky Benedetti she said, “Oh dear have you come to tell me we have got it all wrong?” I laughed and said, “No it’s a very interesting programme, not enough opera of course and I’m a bit worried about the American theme as Trump has just launched a war on Iran”! Ms Benedetti’s response: “Well of course when we planned the programme Trump wasn’t president and Trump isn’t America!” I think she was right to be optimistic, and reading the reviews from all our critics plus the many other reviews I’ve read, I think it’s fair to say that the American theme worked, bringing in jazz to the festival was a success and of course we did get to see great musicians and companies from the US, such as Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Centre Jazz Orchestra and the San Francisco Ballet. This was unfortunately my smallest attendance at any recent festival, due to a combination of old age and illness, but then we do have a very talented team of writers on the Edinburgh Music Review and you can read the thoughts of some of them below.
Hugh Kerr, Editor
Sound Against Fury: Personal Highlights from EIF 2026
By Simon Barrow
If this year’s Edinburgh International Festival proves anything, it is that music thrives best at points of fracture. From the intimacy of the Hub to the Georgian acoustics of the Queen’s Hall and the palatial setting of the Usher Hall, EIF 2026 offered an expanse of musical juxtaposition. It was another season where cultures conversed, historic greats were bathed in contemporary light, and modern idioms confirmed their lineage alongside explorations of the past.
The festival’s vocal highlights carried profound emotional weight. The Jason Max Ferdinand Singers made their EIF debut with gospel-adjacent vitality, joyously bringing the Black Church tradition to Beethoven, jazz piano, and the great American songbook. Yet the human voice also laid bare deep psychological tensions. Away from the opera house, concert staging stripped away theatrical crutches to terrifying effect. Maxim Emelyanychev led the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in a blistering Don Giovanni that presented the libertine not as a simple villain, but as a force of elemental, hypnotic destruction. A week later, Karina Canellakis steered the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and soloists through Richard Strauss’s Elektra – a score that exists in a state of permanent, suffocating climax, turning generational trauma into a visceral sonic assault.
Instrumentally, the festival created dialogue and encouraged reinvention. In their Voices of Canada programme, the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal under Rafael Payare paired a modern masterpiece in Gabriela Ortiz’s subterranean cello concerto Dzonot – inspired by Mayan myth and Mexico’s water caverns – with heart-rending indigenous song and the sumptuous, tongue-in-cheek grandeur of Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. Meanwhile, violinist Vilde Frang and her collaborators dismantled the boundaries of folk and art traditions, pairing Bartók’s ferocious violin sonatas seamlessly with the earthy, vernacular brilliance of the Hungarian group Söndorgő.
Meanwhile, Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra paid homage to Duke Ellington at the Usher Hall, anchoring a broader festival conversation on art, morality, and social justice. Late-night jams at the Hub, spearheaded by jazz drummer Domo Branch and pianist Joe Webb, reminded audiences that tradition is a living, breathing, and remarkably swinging thing. Likewise, the piano became a site of reverence and personal authority as Paul Lewis offered one of three Queen’s Hall recitals paying tribute to his mentor Alfred Brendel, moving fluidly between Mozart and late Schubert with architectural integrity.
Perhaps the most daring programming trick of all belonged to the Gringolts Quartet, who interleaved Schubert’s sprawling, major-minor shifting String Quartet No. 15 with the aphoristic, centennial miniatures of György Kurtág. Kurtág also appeared alongside the micro-genius of György Ligeti and nineteenth century masters in another brilliant Brendel tribute by Pierre-Laurent Aimard. These were a metaphor for the festival as a whole: a reminder that the largest emotional universes can be contained within the sharpest, most disciplined of spaces. Edinburgh 2026 did not offer easy comfort; instead, it provided the necessary depth and quality of varied diverse forms arising from a world trying to understand itself and rise above its menacing storms.
Thoughts on EIF 26
By Kate Calder
'The Galloping Cure' is on the cover of Opera magazine's October edition, which features an interview with composer Missy Mazzoli. Andrew Clark's review is cooler than most, rating Scottish Opera's contribution more highly than Mazzoli's music. Probably its flashing lights and “moderato” music wouldn't have suited me, but I think I was right to predict at the March launch that this was the best programme since Nicola Benedetti became director. The All Rise theme, celebrating 250 years since independence found full-hearted expression in the Opening Concert, Wynton Marsalis's Jazz at the Lincoln Centre Orchestra playing with the RSNO and Festival Chorus in his 1999 symphony. The Jason Max Ferdinand Singers, choral and solo contributors to 'All Rise' presented an excellent programme of religious and secular songs at the Queen's Hall – small choral events now an important strand in Queen's Hall programming.
The following week I was delighted to hear 'The Song of Hiawatha' make its EIF debut, the Festival Chorus outstanding in this big choral sing, which fascinated amateur choirs a century ago, and also in their exploration of American song in 'This Shining Night', from which Joel Thompson's 'Seven Last Words of the Disarmed' is an enduring memory. This year's eight Rising Stars of Voice were given key roles, and, with Louise Alder joining James Baillieu as mentors, they attracted a good audience to their Queen's Hall recital, where Bernstein's 'Let Our Garden Grow' was a splendid finale. The Rising Stars programme for early-career singers is now on a secure footing. John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London showed their star quality in 'The Golden Age of Hollywood', so good I saw it twice.
In non-American works, Maxim Emelyanychev refreshed our views of 'Don Giovanni': his semi -staged Mozart operas with the SCO are the antidote to Regietheater. A collaborative approach with the singers results in convincing characterisation, a louche down-at-heel Giovanni, a Leporello alternately devil-may-care and petrified, and especially Hera Hysang Park's astute Zerlina, flattered by the Don but quickly learning to appreciate her stolid Masetto. Beth Taylor's Queen's Hall recital was the best I've ever seen. Her challenging choices including several premieres provided gripping showcases for her magnificent voice, at its best in her perfectly judged, chilling Orcadian Selkie song.
Free programmes were largely accurate, and the linked online information much improved, though often missing full orchestra lists. The mix of full-time and temporary front-of house staff worked well, with special thanks to the staff who found me the perfect accessible seat to watch the Hiawatha rehearsal. The not-before-time tightening up on mobile use improved concert experience. Ticket pricing, even for early bookers, could be deceptive – my £80 Stalls seat for 'Elektra' provided a back view of the BBCSSO fiddlers, clinging like limpets to the edge of the stage. An 8-year old child plonked himself beside me -”He loves this music,” said parent. He didn't, and I left after 40 minutes to avoid arrest. Memo to EIF: a lower age-limit of 21 for Strauss and 35 for Wagner.
My EIF highlights
By Jean Allen
After an exhilarating August it’s time to look back at the highlights of the month. For me, the Hub has become a very special place to visit, with a great variety of music: the incomparable First Night at the Hub with Nicola Benedetti and surprise guests from the EIF; Classical Jam featuring the stars of tomorrow; and the Aga Khan musicians bringing world music to Edinburgh. Ihsane at the Festival Theatre was a wonderful dance experience which will remain with me for a long time. So much to look back on with awe. Roll on 2027!
Superlatives from this year’s Edinburgh International Festival
By Donal Hurley
“The degree of integration of all creative and technical elements, aural and visual, is at a level I have never experienced before and truly remarkable. ... Frankly, I am blown away by this production.” [The Galloping Cure, Festival Theatre, 9/8]
“The Presto was exciting and virtuosic, with every exuberant life-affirming detail pointed to perfection, earning thunderous applause from the Usher Hall audience.” (Bartók Concerto for Orchestra) [National Youth Orchestra of the USA, Usher Hall, 10/8]
“Yuja Wang’s solo introduction was pure Rachmaninov romanticism ... the big finish, bringing the house down. Fabulous.” [JLCO with Yuja Wang, Usher Hall, 12/8]
“As I have noted before, Sean Shibe’s skill with the independent voicing of the lines was again evident.” [Sean Shibe, Queen’s Hall, 13/8]
“… a superb and revelatory realisation of an early and somewhat less austere Bartók work,” (Piano Quintet) [Kleio Quartet, Makoto Ozone & Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Queen’s Hall, 19/8]
“The anxiety of a troubled mind was caught spellbindingly in the Allemande of the Second Suite – I’ve not heard it better.” [Alisa Weilerstein plays the Cello Suites, Usher Hall, 22/8]
“Beethoven’s … Sonata in E, Op.109 ... finale ... we get Beethoven at his most sublimely inventive. ... Could it be better? Possibly, but I cannot imagine how.” [Víkingur Ólafsson, Usher Hall, 22/8]
“The Pavel Haas Quartet were already my go-to ensemble for revealing the gems of Martinů and Korngold. I can now happily add: unveiling afresh the tuneful beauty of Dvořák.” [Pavel Haas Quartet, Queen’s Hall, 28/8]
“Ernst von Dohnányi’s 1935 4-movement Sextet in C … the finale, which was a jazzy rondo romp and an absolute hoot.” [Members of Berliner Philharmoniker, Queen’s Hall, 29/8]
“Best ‘Enigma’ ever? I reckon so.” [Berliner Philharmoniker, Usher Hall, 29/8]
Photo credit: Clark James