Edinburgh International Festival launches 2025 season

Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) has today released details of its 2025 programme. Running from 1 to 24 August, the festival will focus on the theme of ‘The Truth We Seek’ and feature 133 performances, with seven world premieres, eight UK and Scottish premieres and two European premieres.

Now in its third year under festival director and violinist Nicola Benedetti, the festival is set to welcome over 1,700 artists including 600 from Scotland to the Scottish capital, to guide audiences in explorations of fact, faith and fiction. This year’s programme opens with an immersive eight-hour performance of John Tavener’s The Veil of the Temple given by the Monteverdi Choir, the National Youth Choir of Scotland and Edinburgh Festival Chorus, which this year celebrates its 60^th birthday this year.

At the launch of the programme in London last week, EIF festival director Nicola Benedetti said: ‘In an era of ‘alternative facts’ and manipulated narratives, the arts offer us something deeper: a poetic and metaphorical wisdom that is both more nuanced and more precise.’ She acknowledged that this year’s edition offers a ‘more compact festival due to budget constraints at the time of locking don the programme’, but assured launch attendees that these constraints are no longer an issue.

The 2025 season also sees the launch of a new three-year partnership with the Carnegie Hall. The Hall’s youth orchestra, NYO2, lands in Edinburgh for its European debut led by Venezuelan conductor Rafael Payare, with a programme combining Dmitri Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto – performed alongside American cellist Alisa Weilerstein – and Sergei Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony. 

Further residencies include Poland’s NFM Leopoldinum, and the London Symphony Orchestra under the direction of new chief conductor Sir Antonio Pappano, while further visiting orchestras are set to include the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Budapest Festival Orchestra, and the NCPA Orchestra from Beijing, while the London Philharmonic Orchestra returns to EIF for the first time in a decade.

Elsewhere in the programme Norwegian folk ensemble Barokksolistene, the musical minds behind the successful Alehouse Sessions, joins forces with Scottish talent for The Ceilidh Sessions, an afternoon of music and storytelling inspired by the Gaelic ceilidh tradition and Aurora Orchestra makes its EIF debut with Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony.

The 2025 opera offering will include Opera Queensland’s production of Orpheus and Eurydice in association with Australian contemporary circus company Circa, in its European premiere with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and a chorus from Scottish Opera. The UK premiere of Book of Mountains and Seas fuses opera with puppetry, while the London Symphony Orchestra performs Suor Angelica alongside the Edinburgh Festival Chorus and RSNO Youth Chorus and La clemenza di Tito continues the Scottish Chamber Orchestra's three-year exploration of Mozart's operas.

The festival Hub, will host a series of Up Late gigs as well as two spontaneous ‘jam’ concerts, Jazz Jam and Rising Stars: Classical Jam, which draws inspiration from jazz jam sessions. The wider 2025 programme features 33 accessible performances, and pop-up performances in NHS hospitals alongside, for the first time, a dementia-friendly concert given by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in association with Alzheimer Scotland for people living with dementia, their caregivers, family and friends.

You can find the full programme for 2025 here.