While the Fringe fills the Royal Mile with flyers, the Edinburgh International Festival runs alongside it from 7 to 30 August doing something almost opposite. Where the Fringe is open to anyone, the International Festival is curated to the last detail, and this year it has organised itself around a theme with real weight behind it: All Rise, marking the 250th anniversary of American independence.
An opening that sets the terms
The festival opens with a concert built for the theme, a piece titled All Rise performed by around 200 musicians and singers, drawing together African chant, Gospel, New Orleans parade music and Latin American forms. It is a programming choice that reads as an argument. Rather than marking an American anniversary with a straightforwardly American canon, the festival opens by tracing where that music actually came from, and how much of it arrived through routes nobody chose freely.
Orchestras that rarely share a city
The classical programme is unusually heavy this year. Both the Berliner Philharmoniker and the Los Angeles Philharmonic appear, two of the most distinctive orchestras in the world, and hearing them within the same festival is a genuine luxury for anyone who follows how different traditions handle the same repertoire. Zurich Opera House brings a fully staged production of Verdi’s A Masked Ball, which places grand opera at the centre of the schedule rather than treating it as a garnish.
Why the pairing with the Fringe works
Edinburgh in August is often described as one festival, and it is really several running in parallel with very different philosophies. The Fringe is unfiltered volume. The International Festival is selection and scale, the kind of programme that needs years of planning and international budgets. Visitors who only do one miss the point of the other. The city works best when you spend an afternoon in a forty-seat room watching an unknown and the evening in the Usher Hall watching a world-class orchestra.
The anniversary question
Building a festival around another country’s founding could easily have curdled into flattery. Choosing a theme like All Rise, and opening with music that carries the history of movement, resistance and mixture, suggests a programme that wants to complicate the anniversary rather than celebrate it flatly. For a festival founded in 1947 to help rebuild European cultural life after a war, that instinct feels entirely in character.
