Technology Meets Art at Edinburgh

LONDON â€" The way that technology “seizes and shifts our perceptions of a world” is the theme of this year’s Edinburgh Festival, its director, Jonathan Mills, announced at a press conference this week in the Queen’s Gallery of Buckingham Palace. The festival, which will run from Aug. 9 to Sept. 1, offers its usual dense array of performances and genres, with over 90 productions programmed across all genres.

Mr. Mills highlighted events that, he said, explore the way artists have used the technologies of their time. Citing Beethoven’s “reinvention” of piano composition when he wrote for new steel-framed pianos, he described Gary Hill’s production of the composer’s “Fidelio” for the Opera de Lyon, as “bringing Beethoven into a contemporary vernacular.” An interactive theatrical piece, “Leaving Planet Earth” from the Grid Iron company will transport audiences to “New Earth,” Mr. Mills continued. The Wooster Group’s “Hamlet,❠with its use of 1964 footage of a Richard Burton performance; Philip Glass’s reimagining of Jean Cocteau’s film, “La Belle et la Bête”; the Taiwanese actor Wu Hsing-kuo’s version of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis; and the Beijing People’s Art Theatre’s version of “Coriolanus” will all be shown. (“What’s not to love about about a production that has not one, but two, heavy metal bands,” remarked Mr. Mills.)

There are two mini-festivals within the festival, each accompanied by extensive film programs. “Beckett at the Festival” presents works written by Samuel Beckett for television and radio, here adapted for stage by the Gate Theater Dublin (“Eh Joe,” “I’ll Go On,” “First Love”) and Pan Pan Theater (“Embers” and “All That Fall”).

“Dance Odysseys” offers a welcome long-weekend of new, small-scale dance works that inc! lude seven premieresâ€"a change from the usual large-public dance programming at the festival. (There is that too, in the form of Jose Montalvo’s “Don Quichotte du Trocadéro,” and Benjamin Millepied’s L.A. Dance Project.)

There is prodigious classical music, beginning with Valery Gergiev conducting Prokofiev’s film score of Eisenstein’s 1938 “Alexander Nevsky” at the festival’s opening concert. “This is a festival where you can here the Mahler 2nd Symphony played by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Berio’s mash-up of it in “Sinfonia,” played by the BBC Scottish Symphony,” Mr. Mills said.

He also pointed to the Ensemble musikFabrik’s “Tribute to Frank Zappa,” describing Zappa as a “modernist, sophisticated avant-garde composer influenced by Varese and Cage,” and to a Patti Smith and Philip Glass homage to Allen Ginsburg.

The surprising juxtaposition of Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” and Bartok’s âœBluebeard’s Castle,” directed by Barrie Kosky and sung by the Oper Frankfurt was explained by Mr. Mills as both concerning “a pair of doomed lovers” (although you’d think that might apply to any number of operas).  The most radical-sounding opera proposition was nonetheless “American Lulu,” a version of the Berg opera, reworked, with additional music, by the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth, who has set the piece (directed by John Fulljames and performed by Scottish Opera and The Opera Group) in the American deep South against a background of the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s.

The choice of the Queen’s Gallery for the presentation of the program was linked to a centerpiece exhibition, “Leonardo da Vinci” The Mechanics of Man,” which will show rarely seen anatomical studies by the artist at the Queen’s Gallery in the Palace of Holyroodhouse.

Dating from 1510, when the artist dissected 20 bodies at the University of Pavia’s medical school, the 240 ! detailed ! drawings and 13,000 words of notes have been in the Royal Collection since the late 17th-century.

“It’s the first time the entire manuscript of Leonardo’s anatomy notebooks will be displayed in the U.K., alongside 3D imaging on 60-inch, high-definition screens,” said Martin Clayton, the curator of the show. “It shows his incredible accuracy and the modern relevance of his studies, which chime with contemporary imaging in an extraordinary way.”