August festival presents largest-ever jazz programme alongside full-scale operas and Scottish folk music
This year’s Edinburgh international festival will showcase American art that celebrates the creativity and energy of the US, while also exposing its cruelty and hypocrisy, its director has said.
Nicola Benedetti, the Grammy-award winning violinist now presenting her fourth festival, said Donald Trump’s explosive second term as president made that quest more important than ever.
“It is the largest presentation of American artists in the history of the festival so it’s a huge, a very definitive statement. Quite simply, this is the precise time that it is ideal, urgent, necessary, perfect to be telling the type of story we’re telling,” she said.
This August’s festival is commemorating the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence under the overarching theme of All Rise, derived from the festival’s opening concert, a 200-performer show written for the Jazz at Lincoln Centre Orchestra (JLCO) by her husband, Wynton Marsalis, the trumpeter and orchestra leader, and a multiple Grammy winner.
