The opening concert at the Usher Hall on 6th August features operatic music with Shakespearean themes from Rossini, Bellini and Verdi before the Edinburgh Festival Chorus joins the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia from Rome for Rossini’s version of the hymn to Mary Stabat Mater.
The following night sees Sir Antonio Pappano again conduct his orchestra from Rome in Tchaikovsky and Schoenberg. It features pianist Boris Berezovsky for Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.
Sir John Eliot Gardner conducts a Schumann work for four horns with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra on 11th August. The following evening he conducts the Monteverdi Choir for Bach’s three hour long St Matthew Passion.
Elgar’s grand The Apostles is conducted by Edward Gardner with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Edinburgh Festival Chorus and NYCoS National Girls Choir on 14th August.
The Festival's Honorary President, Valery Gergiev conducts a concert performance of Wagner’s Das Rheingold with St Petersburg’s Mariinsky Opera sung in German on 15th August.
Pianist Daniil Trifonov has a solo concert and plays Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 1 with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Krill Karabits conducts two concerts with the Russian National Orchestra playing Mussorgsky, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Silvestrov, Rachmaninov and Scriabin.
Marin Alsop brings the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, Osmo Vänskä the recently strike-ridden Minnesota Orchestra and Yannick Nézét Seguin the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. Herbert Blomstedt will be 89 when he conducts the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, one of the world’s great orchestras, in Bach, Bruckner, Beethoven and Mendelssohn.
Pierre Boulez who died in January this year had a 56-year association with the Festival which is celebrated in the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s concert on 12th August. There’s an interesting two evenings of Barry Humphries, Meow Meow and the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s in their Weimar Cabaret at the Usher Hall.
Edinburgh’s Donald Runnicles conducts the final concert of Gurrelieder, Schoenberg’s epic cantata with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Christopher Bell’s Edinburgh Festival Chorus. Not only ending the Festival but the concert ends Donald Runnicles last concert with the Orchestra.
There's a feast of great orchestras with their conductors coming to Edinburgh and a feast too of great music. Interesting though, just one work from Mozart, Mikhail Pletnev playing his piano concerto number 24. Nothing this year from Scotland's Sir James Macmillan.