Bucharest's Enescu Festival announces month-long event from 28 August

These days the biennial Enescu Festival rivals the Proms in terms of number and breadth of concerts and surpasses them in the number of visiting orchestras. The programme for this year's event has just been announced and includes seven British orchestras – the LSO, LPO, RPO, Philharmonia, London Mozart Players, Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields and John Wilson's Sinfonia of London. There's also the veteran actor Robert Powell (narrating the texts for Grieg's Peer Gynt and Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex) and the Tippett Quartet.

The festival's director, Mihai Constantinescu, said that the reason for booking so many UK ensembles was 'first, because over the years they have proved to be among the best performers of Enescu's music and, second to show that Brexit has no relevance to music. British musicians are part of Europe'. He said that the Romanian government had guaranteed there would be no problems with visas or work permits, though there could be issues with other EU countries over the requirement for transport carnets for orchestral lorries. The LSO and Sir Simon Rattle will be giving performances of Stravinsky's symphonies along with Enescu's Isis and Ondrej Adamek's Where Are You, with a text in seven languages, written in an especially low register for Magdalena Kozena after he had heard her deep speaking voice.

It is planned to have live audiences of between 50 and 70% of seats, with all concerts being available online on a pay-per-view basis for 12 hours via the festival website (contract objections have prevented a larger window).

2021 marks Enescu's 140th anniversary and the festival's 25th edition; though it has actually being going since the 1960s (the LSO first visted with Andre Previn in 1973), its frequency and scale mirroring the undulations of Romanian politics and the capacity of its home orchestras. At the turn of the century they were not in good shape but nowadays the orchestras from Cluj-Napoca, Iasi, Sibiu, Bucharest and Timisoara hold their own impressively and they carry the burden of much of the festival's contemporary music programme.

At the launch Dmitri Sitkovetsky described the challenge facing travelling musicians as 'a cross between a Chinese puzzle and a steeplechase'. Nonetheless Vasily Petrenko, who is due to conduct one of his first concerts as the RPO's music director, said he feels the festival's schedule 'is a big sign that life will get back to normal. José Cura, who will conduct the Philharmonia in a concert of his own music, including a new Te Deum, is relishing the prospect of contact with a live audience again. Kathrin Deventer, secretary-general of the European Festivals Association, underlined how important it is that the announcement has come now, emphasising that, whatever the problems, festivals are happening.

Other orchestras performing include those of the Maryinsky (Gergiev conducting Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk), La Scala, Zurich Tonhalle and Concertgebouw Amstersdam, along with the French National, Munich and Israel Philharmonics, Les Arts Florissant and the Berlin Radio Symphony (with the festival's artistic director, Vladimir Jurowski) – and an impressive collection of chamber orchestras.

The full programme is available at https://www.festivalenescu.ro/en/festival-2021/program/