Youth takes centre stage at Edinburgh international festival

The Edinburgh international festival is to celebrate the virtuosity of youth and mark the harrowing loss of teenage lives in the trenches, a century after the first world war ended.

This August’s festival will bridge the century by opening with a mass audience light show featuring five telegrams sent home by young soldiers, contemporary music from acts such as St Vincent and Mogwai, and a programme of concerts by some of the world’s finest youth orchestras.

Fergus Linehan, the festival’s director, said the classic music sector felt under huge pressure to make itself attractive to younger audiences – Scotland is holding a year of young people in 2018.

“It feels like an opportunity to say, in this year, let’s just celebrate virtuosity among young people,” he said.

The festival’s opening concert will feature Scotland’s national youth choir singing Haydn’s Creation, the youth jazz orchestra from Carnegie Hall in New York and YOA Orchestras of the Americas, an acclaimed ensemble from North and South America, as well as the national youth orchestra of Canada.

Source: theguardian