Edinburgh International Festival reveals 2023 programme

Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) has today announced the programme for its 2023 festival, the first under new director Nicola Benedetti. Running from 4-27 August, this year’s programme will include 295 events celebrating music, opera, dance and theatre from over 2,000 artists from across the globe.

Inspired by the book Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? by activist Martin Luther King Jr, Benedetti has built this year’s programme around the question ‘where do we go from here?’, encouraging audiences to explore the transformative power of the arts.

Benedetti said: ‘After we have celebrated 75 years of our Festival, we now enter into a new phase of redefining, together, where we go next… At a time of huge global change and challenge, we will hear powerful and diverse perspectives of artists from across the world. Edinburgh International Festival has long been dedicated to advocating world-class performing art and innovating new ways to bring it to audiences.’

As well as tackling this overarching question, the 2023 season encourages audiences and artists to respond to three topics: ‘community over chaos’, ‘hope in the face of adversity’, and ‘a perspective that’s not one’s own’. Audiences can also grapple with these concepts through a keynote series run in partnership the Festival of Politics in the Scottish Parliament.

This year’s festival also marks a shift for the festival’s Hub space at the top of Edinburgh's Royal Mile. Open from 12pm–5pm (and late on performance nights) throughout August, this space will become an ‘open green room’ for the festival. Audiences will gain unprecedented access to festival performers through afternoon and evening informal events and concerts focusing on the festival’s themes. This focus on audience experience, development and inclusion will spread throughout the festival through participatory events, talks, and intimate performances. 

Opening the festival, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Edinburgh Festival Chorus will give the Scottish premiere of Tan Dun’s Buddha Passion, conducted by the composer himself. The 2023 festival will also host three orchestral residencies designed to increase community engagement and offer a more sustainable alternative to traveling for a single performance.

Orchestras in residence include the Budapest Festival Orchestra, led by conductor Iván Fischer, which will present four concerts including an all-Hungarian programme of works with Sir András Schiff and the NYCOS National Girls Choir and an informal performance of Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony where the stalls will be replaced by beanbags and the audience will be seated amongst the orchestra.

The London Symphony Orchestra will present programmes focusing with artists including principal guest conductor Gianandrea Noseda, Nicola Benedetti and Sir Simon Rattle. The young members of the Venezuelan Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela will be in residence for the festival’s final week, joined by conductors Gustavo Dudamel and Rafael Payare.

As well as the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Chorus’ performance of The Magic Flute, the festival’s opera offering will include Theatre of Sound’s RPS Award-winning production of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle which reimagines the story in the context of a husband and wife living with dementia.

The KBS Symphony Orchestra will make its UK debut at the festival as part of a programme celebrating of 140 years of diplomatic relations between Korea and the UK. This programme will also include festival debuts from artists including pianist Yeol Eum Son, violinist Clara-Jumi Kang and the Novus String Quartet. The 2023 programme will also feature the festival’s first performance of Wagner’s Tannhäuser, with Sir Donald Runnicles conducting the Deutsche Oper Berlin and American tenor Clay Hilley making his role debut as Tannhäuser before taking the role across Europe in the upcoming season.

You can find out more about this year’s programme at the Edinburgh International Festival website.