London Evening Standard/London
Punk poet Patti Smith, Leonardo da Vinci and a Beijing production of Coriolanus that features not one but two Chinese heavy metal bands are all set to be highlights of this year’s Edinburgh international festival, in a summer exploring the connections between artists and the cutting-edge technology of their times - from Beethoven’s writing for the new steel-framed pianos of his day to Samuel Beckett’s works for the radio.
The festival, which runs from August 9 to September 1, will begin with Valery Gergiev conducting Prokofiev’s film score of Eisenstein’s 1938 epic Alexander Nevsky. It will then present Opra de Lyon’s production of Beethoven’s Fidelio - an opera that, with its focus on “freedom, good and evil” is the perfect work for our time, according to the festival’s artistic director Jonathan Mills. “It is about rendition, torture, the suspension of habeas corpus; people sent to prison for no reason by a powerful despot.”
Patti Smith and Philip Glass will perform a homage to beat poet Allen Ginsberg in words and music; while Glass will also provide his own score, performed live, for Cocteau’s classic film La Belle et la Bte.
The festival will also see the first visit from the LA Dance Project, a new dance company founded by Benjamin Millepied, celebrated for his work in the film Black Swan, which he choreographed and starred in alongside Natalie Portman.
Audiences are also invited to participate in a commission for the festival. Tod Machover, the American composer based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) media lab, is asking people from anywhere in the world to share sounds that he will then use as musical material for a new work called Festival City.