| The Scotsman march 18th, 2002 |
'This job? It can change people's lives'
BY MIKE WADE
Every year, people ask Brian McMaster the same question: What will be the highlight of this year's Edinburgh International Festival? Every year the director of the event struggles to find the answer. With such riches, how can you ever select the best?
This year's programme, which will be unveiled on Thursday, is McMaster's 11th, the first fruits of the three-year contract which will represent his final commitment to the world's largest arts festival.
A fiercely private and modest man, he will withdraw with his customary grace in 2004, at 60, but don't expect him to flag at all in the next 30 or so months before retirement.
"I love this job," he says, scanning the blue waters of the Forth from his magnificently lofty office at the top of the Festival's Hub. "But then sometimes I hate it. It's been called the best job in the arts, even by me.
"It was difficult bringing together this year's festival, because it's quite an ambitious programme. There are moments when you wake up in the middle of the night and think: 'Christ!' But, of course, it's a great job," McMaster says.
At this sensitive stage, he can't offer a guide to the hot tickets, but a look around the Festival website indicates this year's feast is likely to be every bit as rich as its predecessors.
Provisionally booked are the Philharmonia Orchestra and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Boris Charmatz, Sir Charles Mackerras, the Swedish Radio Choir, brilliant and perennial favourites Andras Schiff and Claudio Abbado, as well as Richard Goode, Wagner's Parsifal, Thomas Ostermeier ... the list goes on, and that's just the first week.
With such a line-up in the offing, it's not surprisingly perhaps that the BBC has already committed to cover over 50 concerts. It means that the Festival audience will be extended radically, because of an agreement between the British broadcasters and the European Broadcasting Union.
"I'm not sure it's particularly the ultimate criterion or success, but this year, by that measure, we are doing the best ever," he says, with something like satisfaction.
What makes the bill all the more extraordinary is the fact that as this one is going to press, next year's programme is already under construction - controversial opera director Calixto Bieito has already been invited to produce Hamlet in 2003. But then, as McMaster explains, when you sit down and plan a festival on this vast scale, you are trying to achieve all kinds of different goals, all at the same time.
"Since 1947, the Festival has been a huge magnet for people to come to the city. You have to put things on in the city that provide an incentive for people to get on to a plane in Los Angeles, change planes and get off in Edinburgh," he says.
"In itself, a festival creates a lot of excitement which makes it potentially the best way to attract a new audience to the arts. We have a huge responsibility in that respect, a responsibility to profile what goes on in Scotland to an international audience.
"The arts at their best can change people's lives and we can provide a context which can make people come to things they otherwise wouldn't see. They'll find that in the Festival, they'll come to something that is completely off-the-wall which they wouldn't normally come to for the other 49 weeks of the year. That's a responsibility too."
This year, McMaster's efforts have been helped by the decision of the Scottish Executive to award the Festival oe400,000, boosting an annual income of around oe6.1million (comprising a Scottish Arts Council grant of oe890,000, and an Edinburgh City Council grant of oe1.3 million; ticket sales, sponsorship and other trading accounts for the remainder).
For seven years, he says, he has nursed "the modest ambition" to return public funding to the levels enjoyed in 1994. By achieving that this time around, he feels the Festival has received a vote of confidence, underlining its importance to both the city and to Scotland as a whole.
In the wider arts community, the strategic role has never been more apparent. For James Boyle, chairman of the Scottish Arts Council, the Festival has become the standard by which other arts events and performances are gauged.
For their part, the parliamentary education sport and culture committee naturally turned to McMaster in their debates following the row over the artistic direction of Scottish Ballet.
How does it feel to have such an influential voice? All Festival directors have different tastes, he says, "but in applying that taste, one is a aware that the Festival can do a major job for Scottish arts organisations."
But, he insists, he has to put on "the right sort of work", because you can get things wrong. In his very first Festival, for example, he engaged a Russian tenor whose nerves got the better of him. "He was on to the whisky before the concert rather than after, and I don't think he's sung in the west since. The thing was broadcast live."
To his delight, last year he was able to commission all of Scotland's orchestras, and is proud that the Scottish Chamber Orchestra is currently recording with Alfred Brendel and Charles Mackerras, a partnership created in Edinburgh. Likewise, it was exciting for him to see the Royal Lyceum Theatre in New York, or to see Scottish Opera in Vienna, as a direct result of the festival.
In the particular case of Scottish Ballet, he reveals he did meet with the former artistic director Galina Samsova, but she left the company before a project materialised.
For now, he adds: "I desperately want to commission Scottish Ballet, when I can be of use to them, and they to us." Though you infer he would not expect cultural tourists to choke the departure lounges of Los Angeles international Airport en route to a performance of The Snowman.
Of more immediate concern to McMaster is meeting the wider Scottish audience and, in particular, the residents of Glasgow. In the arts, the divide between the cities seems almost as big as ever, and even the cautious McMaster admits his first glance at market research on this subject, ten years ago, was "frightening", revealing the extraordinary resistance of the west coast to the big noise 45 miles to the east.
But perhaps the fact he was recently awarded an honorary doctorate by Glasgow University suggests a thawing of relations. He thinks there are good signs the local and national tourist may indulge in some "joined-up thinking", to help Glasgow hotels make the most of the overflow of visitors in the summer.
But his conclusion remains bittersweet. "We are incredibly lucky because we have two cities which are so different in character and yet both are absolutely wonderful. That is a resource we have which is absolutely special. It is something to cherish, but so many people don't. And that failure goes so deep," McMaster says. But mostly, he is very upbeat, looking forward to the first ticket sales on Thursday and then, in August, the start of another great circus.
He tells a story showing his hunger for the main event. "It was towards the end of the Festival, late at night, in this building, a very great conductor had just given what I thought was one of the greatest concerts I'd ever heard.
"Sitting here in the euphoria, we hatched an idea and he said to me: 'That's fantastic, we've got to do that'. Well, I went home to bed and woke up in the middle of the night absolutely terrified. The whole thing was on a scale which we couldn't really cope with. I thought it would just disappear and never see the light of day."
Two weeks later the conductor rang from Berlin, and the wheels started turning. Three years on, the dream will be realised in Edinburgh's late summer.
McMaster smiles, as if to say, "And on Thursday all will be revealed."
Diary
The Scotsman - United Kingdom; Mar 22, 2002
BY SIMON PIA
A game of three halves for the golden oldies VIVE Les Legendes. Norrie "I used to be myth" Rowan has organised a Scottish Legends v French Legends this afternoon at Union Park in Corstorphine, as an appetiser for tomorrow's Murrayfield encounter.
We had trouble contacting Norrie at first but he told us in future just to dial 999. "They'll tell you where I am."
Those posted for the Scottish XV include Rob Wainwright, Peter Wright, Ian Paxton, Sean Lineen, Alan Tait and Iwan Tukalo, to name but a few.
Among the French legionnaires are Pascal Ondarts, Phillipe Sella (111 caps), Jean Pierre Genet and the one and only Walter Spanghero.
The most contested part Norrie reckons will be the "third half - in the clubhouse when all the drinking is done". Monsieur Ondarts is some singer, we hear. He could put a front row of Maurice Chevalier, Sacha Distel and Charles Aznavour to shame.
Meanwhile, one leading rugger scribe told us when we reeled off the names: "I'd rather be there than at Murrayfield."
AT Dynamic Earth, the Lismore Appeal (affectionately known as the Hearts and Balls Fund) is raising funds to help young players who seriously injured themselves playing rugby to enjoy life to the full.
One of the items on auction will be a signed pair of Lennox Lewis's boxing gloves. Bill McLaren's notes from Scotland's 500th international and Bill's last ever Calcutta Cup match will also be up for auction. Do we hear 500 quid?
Para for course OUR man in mufti calls - the one who chided "Mad Max" Hastings over his mispronunciation of 45 Commando. (The "military historian" had the audacity to cry them "Forty Five" instead of "Four-Five").
Neil Griffiths is not happy. "You have come perilously close to alleging that I was once a Royal Marine - a Bootneck, as we called them. Let me make this quite clear: yours truly was a Para, and as such you should know we had less than cordial relations with the Booties. In fact, you could describe it as a permanent combat footing. Why do you think there was such a mad scramble between 2 Para and 45 Cdo to get to Port Stanley? To liberate the oppressed, to fly the Union flag, to strangle Max Hastings?"
To strangle Max?
"No, simply to beat the other. The case was settled only when 45 found themselves trapped in a minefield on the town's outskirts, allowing 2 Para to saunter past, before gallantly welcoming 45 into the smoking ruins about an hour later. In those famous biblical words: God is airborne."
Ready for the off MUSICAL chairs at the Scottish Office but, never fear, Jack "the Knife" is not wielding his blade.
However, "Sir Humphrey" is rearranging the furniture.
Michael Ewart has been appointed new head of the Scottish executive's education department, while John Elvidge has moved to be head of finance.
Could Elvidge's name be in the frame along with Robert Gordon, the Crown Office's chief executive, if Muir Russell, the current head of the Scottish civil service, gets the top job in Whitehall? Muir is on the short list for the London hot-seat.
Elvidge revealed to Der Schotte some time ago he only went to Oxford because when he was 14, a history teacher grabbed him by his blazer lapels, pinned him against a corridor wall and told him he was clever enough to do so. Ideal preparation for his years with Mr McConnell.
Likewise, he learnt his numeracy skills playing cards and calculating odds at races with his grandfather, who was a bookie. Ideal preparation for working with the finance minister, Andy Kerr.
Festival freak-out IT'S hard to imagine Brian McMaster "freaking out", but the director of the Edinburgh Festival confessed to as much at the launch of this year's programme.
After lining up the conductor Claudio Abbado to perform Parsifal with the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester - an international spectacular - he woke up in the middle of the night and "freaked out". What a project ... the sheer scale of it ... Claudio will surely have forgotten! But Abbado phoned the next day. "Wonderful idea, Brian."
Sigh of relief. "Well, I suppose we are doing it then, Claudio."
Meanwhile, McMaster posed a conundrum. On the subject of "Them and Us", a series of concerts of political songs ranging from the Jacobites to Govanhill swimming pool, the director pointed out: "So far no-one has been able to find any from the Right. Any ideas? We would include them. Honest." Aye, right.
The Lord of the Rings tells us if you put John Swinney into a Hobbit name generator he comes out as: Olo Grubb.
As for Jack McConnell, he is: Sancho Hamwich of Buckleberry Fern. We thought you would like to know.
Festival courts younger audience with late nights and lower prices
The Scotsman - United Kingdom; Mar 22, 2002
BY MIKE WADE
LIKE a Michelin-starred chef seeking the widest range of customers, Brian McMaster yesterday unveiled a rich and diverse bill of fare for the Edinburgh International Festival, but offered at prices a varied audience could afford.
Taking pride of place in the extended, 26-day event is Peter Stein's staging of Richard Wagner's Parsifal, conducted by Claudio Abbado and billed as a "once-in-a-lifetime" production.
Other highlights include Siegfried, the third part of Scottish Opera's acclaimed production of the Ring cycle, Ro Theatre's MacBeth, recitals by the pianists Richard Goode, Alfred Brendel and Andras Schiff, and major dance works by Emio Greco and Boris Chamnatz.
For most shows, tickets start at oe5 or oe6, though such is the scale of Parsifal, the highest-priced seats cost oe100, a first in the festival's history.
As part of an effort to reach out to a new and younger audience, Mr McMaster, the festival director, also announced a series of late-night concerts at the Usher Hall, in which all seats in the 2,000-capacity auditorium will cost oe5.
This low-price programme has been timetabled to begin on 5 August, just after the opening of the Festival Fringe and ahead of the rest of the EIF bill, which stages its official opening concert six days later.
The early extension is designed to take advantage of the audience for the Fringe, which, to the continuing irritation of EIF organisers, has begun a week ahead of the Festival since 1998. Significantly, the oe5 nights are priced lower than most shows at the main Fringe venues.
This year's Festival will cost oe7.4 million, the bill met in a roughly even three-way split between public subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council and Edinburgh City Council, commercial sponsorship and ticket sales.
With this kind of investment, Mr McMaster is keenly aware of the Festival's role in nurturing Scottish arts and drew attention to its role in supporting domestic talent.
Douglas Maxwell's Variety, which charts the demise of music hall in Scotland, will be staged at the King's Theatre, in a show produced by the Edinburgh-based Grid Iron Theatre Company.
The play will be supported by a talk from the entertainer Johnny Beattie, 76, whom Mr McMaster described as "the last great performer from the glory days of Scottish variety."
The Royal Lyceum Theatre stages The Girl on the Sofa, by the Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse, in a new translation by David Harrower, while at the Usher Hall, Stuart MacRae's Violin Concerto will be performed by Christian Tetzlaff.
The Hub will host another Scottish innovation, Them and Us, a concert series of political songs taking in all periods from the Jacobite rebellion to recent protests over the closure of Govanhill swimming pool in Glasgow.
The major Scottish orchestras, the RSNO, the SCO and the BBC SSO will feature in the Usher Hall programme. Scottish Ballet, however, remains a notable absentee from the list of national companies on the bill, reflecting continuing doubts over the quality of its work.
Nevertheless, the programme embraces what Mr McMaster called "the wonderful diversity of dance", from an exposition of the six styles of Indian classical dance, to Luminous, a new work by the Japanese choreographer Saburo Teshigawara. The latter features the skills of the blind performer Stuart Jackson.
Mr McMaster refused to be drawn on his own festival favourite, saying he anticipated 150 highlights. However, it is plain that the prospect of Parsifal has a special place in his heart.
The director suggested the project to Abbado in 1999, following the conductor's triumphant interpretation of Mahler's seventh symphony with the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester.
Realised in the grand manner, Parsifal is a collaboration with the Salzburg Easter Festival and features the Jugendorchester, the Arnold Schoenberg Choir, the Prague Philharmonic Choir and the Tolzer Knabenchor.
At the other end of the scale, highlights of the "oe5 Nights" include Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, performed by Alice Coote and Jonas Kaufmann, and recitals by Schiff and Brendel.
The Festival runs from 11 to 31 August. The Royal Bank oe5 Nights begin on 5 August.
Tuned to the song of life
The Scotsman - United Kingdom; Mar 22, 2002
BY MICHAEL CHURCH
The stomach cancer that nearly carried off Claudio Abbado last year found an unusually tough customer: that this great Italian conductor is active again - despite the loss of his entire digestive system - reflects the tenacity bred in him from the start.
Abbado grew up in wartime Milan. His father was a violinist and teacher at the Verdi Conservatory; his Sicilian mother was a children's writer who defied the fascists by sheltering a Jewish child. Young Claudio first showed his mettle by daubing "Viva Bartok!" on public buildings, at a time when that composer was seen as dangerously subversive.
His ancestry was distinguished, being traceable back to a 12th-century Arab warrior named Abbad who built the Alcazar in Seville. But resistance to Fascism was the keynote of his childhood in Milan, and that is what has coloured his life ever since. As an idealistic young conductor at the Scala in Milan, he organised concerts with his friend, pianist Maurizio Pollini, to take classical music into factories.
His first musical studies were at the piano with his father, but he went on to study in Vienna with the eccentric pianist Friedrich Gulda, whose adventures into jazz put him beyond the pale for musicians of a conservative stamp.
Meanwhile Abbado had been bitten by the conducting bug. The Damascene moment came when he first heard Claude Debussy's Nocturnes; he started to watch the great stick-wavers at the Scala, and when he was 18 was summoned to play and conduct for the ageing Toscanini.
"A conductor must consider himself first and foremost a musician," he says now. "The whole idea of the conductor as some sort of god or dictator is absurd - especially as the age of the autocrat is now finished. Early on in my career, I watched George Szell at work. And yes, he was a notorious tyrant, but my God, what results he achieved.
"I resolved to try to achieve similar results, but without resorting to his bullying methods." He might have said the same of Toscanini, another notable tyrant whose methods he deplored. "I suppose my style of conducting is very similar to that of Furtwangler, who once told the orchestra in rehearsal to do it again, but next time to look at him, and try to understand what he meant."
Indeed, the diffident Furtwangler was in many ways his exemplar: Abbado has become known as the man who says little but always gets magical results.
"During a concert you can't talk," he says. "So why should you talk much at rehearsals?"
Zubin Mehta, with whom he studied in Vienna, was his absolute antithesis, and indeed got on to the conducting fast-track much earlier, but Abbado's slow and ruminative style yielded more substantial rewards in the end.
His position as head of the fabled Berlin Philharmonic - Simon Rattle's immediate predecessor - was the late culmination of this process, which began with opera conducting in Milan. Shored up by his local links - at one stage he played inside-right for the Scala's company football team - he built a very strong power base in that city.
His conducting of Mahler was transcendent from the start; his Verdi, Bellini and Rossini became renowned, and invitations to conduct came thick and fast from London, Paris, and New York.
But during the 1960s and 70s he was also nailing his colours to the mast as a reviver of rare Italian operas, and as an interpreter of Berg. He may not have talked much - he has always hated doing interviews - but his actions spoke volumes about his radical intentions.
A refusal to compromise has characterised his professional career - evidenced in London by his vocal objection to the sound and ambience of the Barbican's hall. On the other hand, his private life has been tangled, taking in one failed marriage and a series of romantic liasons which have provoked much gossip. Orchestral musicians who have worked with him speak of his fear of confrontations, which has sometimes led him to store up trouble - both for himself and others. He hates to say no.
He has always been a staunch supporter of young musicians, founding the European Community Youth Orchestra in 1978 and touring with it subsequently through the years.
"A lot of young conductors these days believe that technique is everything," he says. "But believe me, it is nothing. First and foremost, a conductor must know a score intimately. Listen to any of the great postwar conductors - Toscanini, Bruno Walter, Carlos Kleiber, Furtwangler. They didn't have technique, but they did have something to say."
Now, post-cancer and nearly 70, he is finding himself gravitating more and more to Bach, whose music he originally played as a young organist and pianist.
In Simon Rattle's view, Abbado triumphed over cancer through conducting Wagner's Tristan. He decided he would survive if he found new ways to eat and conduct, and it is our good fortune he succeeded in both.
Claudio Abbado conducts Parsifal at Edinburgh Festival Theatre, 12, 15 and 18 August and the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, Usher Hall, 20 August
Big's still best
The Scotsman - United Kingdom; Mar 22, 2002
BY GRAEME KAY
We expect Edinburgh to present large-scale pieces beyond the normal resources of cash-strapped arts organisations. And on that score, 2002's Festival certainly delivers.
It starts with the traditional Usher Hall blockbuster, Berlioz's Te Deum. The 1855 premiere took place in SaintEustache, Paris, on the eve of the Universal Exhibition. Performing it were a vast orchestra, two adult choirs, a children's chorus, a tenor soloist and an organ. Berlioz's work propelled the orchestra into becoming an engine of unlimited expressive possibility for composers. Liszt dedicated his gigantic Faust Symphony - also to be performed in August - to Berlioz, and its ripples can be detected all over this year's Festival.
In this extraordinary work Liszt's deployment of the whole-tone scale, a shifting harmonic language, and use of motor rhythms, are all remarkably forward-looking. Later at the Festival you can follow that trail in Debussy's La Mer and Stravinsky's Agon.
The connection to Wagner is almost umbilical: Liszt's daughter Cosima left conductor husband Hans von Bulow for him. You can hear how Wagner transformed Liszt's use of musical motives in Parsifal under Claudio Abbado and in Siegfried, the latest instalment in Scottish Opera's production of one of the largest works of art ever conceived and executed, Der Ring des Nibelungen.
Of course, every composer dreams of being told: "Write what you want, make it as long as you want, choose whatever instruments you want; oh ... and take as long as you want."
Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Serge Koussevitsky must have had an unusual degree of confidence in the young Olivier Messiaen to commission him in such terms; but the result, in 1949, was the monumental Turangalila Symphony. Scored for an orchestra vastly expanded both numerically and by the addition of tuned percussion, solo piano and that weirdly wailing electronic instrument, the ondes martenot, this 80-minute work - described by the composer as a "love-song, hymn to joy, time, movement, rhythm, life and death" - is one of the monumental masterpieces of the 20th century.
To ears adjusted by exposure to 50 years of atonal music, Turangalila now sounds impossibly lush and romantic.
Larging it - musically-speaking - applies as much to the scale of the composers' vision as to the resources used to articulate that vision. So we find Handel tackling great spiritual issues in his late oratorio, Jephtha. Jephtha vows he will sacrifice to God the first thing he sees if he returns from battle victorious; when this turns out to be his beautiful daughter Iphis, an angel has to intervene to say the Holy Spirit inspired the vow and will be satisfied if Iphis merely spends her life as a virgin (in the Bible, she dies). However dubious the theology of the original story and the contrived happy ending, Handel provides sublime music for this ambitious exploration of the precariousness of life.
In Dvorak's massive oratorio Saint Ludmila - the 1886 premiere of which featured120 musicians and 350 singers - we see the conversion to Christianity of an early Bohemian saint, and the heralding of a united future for the Bohemian peoples through faith, love and hope. This would not, at first glance, be the sort of material calculated to appeal to a British audience - we will get a chance to judge when the RSNO and the Festival Chorus perform under Jiri Belolavek.
No less ambitious is the secular vision of the contemporary German composer Heiner Goebbels. His Surrogate Cities, to be performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, is a suite of evocative pieces for two solo vocalists, orchestra and sampler. Through sound and allusive poetry and lyrics, Goebbels says he is trying "to read the city as a text and then to translate some of its mechanics and architecture into music".
Comparatively few composers, however, entertain visions as eccentric as Charles Ives. His Universe Symphony, for instance, was intended to encompass the whole of time and creation, and to be played on two layers - the earthbound and the spiritual - simultaneously. An outdoor event too ambitious to produce, it was to involve choirs on hilltops and orchestras in the valleys below. Ives's Symphony No 3: The Camp Gathering is rarely performed, but at Edinburgh this year we can enjoy a reading of it by the conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. The gathering of the symphony's title refers to the outdoor revivalist meetings Ives attended in his youth. The spirit of Bach and evangelical hymn-singing pervades the music.
Berlioz's Te Deum (Philharmonia), Usher Hall, 11 August; Liszt's Faust Symphony (RSNO) Usher Hall, 12 August; Debussy's La Mer (Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester), Usher Hall, 20 August; Stravinsky's Agon (Los Angeles Philharmonic), Usher Hall, 28 August; Parsifal, Festival Theatre, 12, 15 and 18 August; Siegfried (Scottish Opera), Festival Theatre, 25, 28 and 31 August; Messiaen's Turangalila- symphonie (Orchestre National de Lyon), Usher Hall, 22 August; Jephtha (Scottish Chamber Orchestra), Usher Hall, 25 August; Dvorak's Saint Ludmila (RSNO/Festival Chorus) Usher Hall, 31 August; Goebbels's Surrogate Cities (BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra), Usher Hall, 30 August; Ives's Symphony No 3 (Orpheus Chamber Orchestra) Usher Hall, 15 August.
A year of promise
The Scotsman - United Kingdom; Mar 22, 2002
BY BRIAN MCMASTER
It is a great pleasure to contribute to this preview of the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF). Published to coincide with the launch of the 2002 Festival programme, The Scotsman preview offers the first independent analysis of our programme; I look forward to it with both trepidation and great interest.
If we are doing our jobs properly, there will always be new and unfamiliar work in the programme - I believe that is what a Festival is for - and this preview gives Scotsman readers an opportunity to find out more about the artists and productions we are presenting.
I am often asked for my highlights of the Festival and I always find this an impossible question to answer. I hope and believe that everything in the programme will be special, and will give audiences pleasure. However, there are some events in the 2002 Festival that merit special mention. The opening opera production of Wagner's Parsifal, which we present in collaboration with the Salzburg Easter Festival, is possibly one of the most ambitious projects the Festival has undertaken. The idea came about after Claudio Abbado's astonishing concert of Mahler's 7th Symphony with the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester at the 1999 Festival. For me, this was one of the most wonderful concerts I have attended . As Abbado was planning to do a new production of Parsifal for Salzburg Easter Festival, where he is the artistic director, I asked him if he would bring it to Edinburgh as well, with the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester. As I write this, three years and a great deal of planning and fundraising later, final rehearsals are underway in Salzburg. The production is directed by Peter Stein, and has an absolutely wonderful cast of singers. I hope that everyone who sees it will find it a real once-in-a-lifetime experience, and I'd like to record my thanks here to the Dunard Fund and the EIF Endowment Fund, who have made exceptional donations to the Festival to make the project possible.
Another real "Festival project" is our production of Jon Fosse's The Girl on the Sofa. We present the world premiere of this play, in a version by Scots playwright David Harrower directed by Thomas Ostermeier, director of the Schaubuhne Berlin with a cast of British actors. Norwegian Fosse is one of Europe's most interesting, and regularly performed, contemporary playwrights, but his work is relatively unknown in the UK. Following Thomas Ostermeier's production of Feuergesicht (Fireface) at the 1999 Festival, I approached the Traverse theatre - whose expertise in commissioning new writing for the stage is unrivalled - with the idea of commissioning Fosse to write a new play, to be directed by Ostermeier. Ostermeier has a particular affinity both with British theatre - in particular with the work of David Harrower - and with Fosse. The results will be seen this August; I think that the script is wonderful, and hope that the production will show the benefits of true international co-operation.
Alongside introducing new faces to the Festival and the UK, I believe it is very important that the Festival builds relationships with artists - enabling audiences to follow their work, and allowing the artist the freedom to present new aspects of their creative output. Artists love to come to Edinburgh - they enjoy the creativity and the fun of the Festival city, and they enjoy the responsiveness of Festival audiences. This year sees a residency from the great American pianist Richard Goode with five concerts; the return of Emio Greco/PC - some of the most individual and compelling work in the world of contemporary dance - with two new works; and the return of Boris Charmatz with two extraordinary dance installation pieces, which challenge the boundaries between dance and the visual arts.
A final word on prices. Part of the ethos of the Festival is that people come to as many events as possible. You will see that we have introduced a new series of concerts at just oe5 a seat - but remember that nearly every Festival event has oe5 seats available from the day we open booking, and that there are also oe5 day seats for Usher Hall concerts and opera performances.
I hope you enjoy making your choices, and that you all have a very happy and fulfilling 2002 Edinburgh International Festival.
Brian McMaster Director, Edinburgh International Festival. Cover shows Oedipus Rex with Symphony of Blues Canadian Opera Company. Picture: Michael Cooper
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