The Budapest Festival Orchestra is a regular at the Edinburgh Festival, where they will be staging Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni opera this year. As long ago as 2011, The New York Times was describing Iván Fischer’s production of Don Giovanni as “more involving, imaginative and theatrically daring” than many full opera-house performances. This year, a whole new cast will be introducing you to the world’s most notorious womaniser, in one of the greatest compositions ever conceived.
The festival was founded in 1947, in a post-war effort to “provide a platform for the flowering of the human spirit” – an aim which has since been achieved, as Edinburgh immediately found itself on the map of prominent festivals.
One of the festival’s main venues is the Edinburgh Festival Theatre, formerly the Empire Palace Theatre. Besides hosting opera and ballet performances, as the home of the Scottish Opera and the Scottish Ballet, it is also used as a concert hall. The theatre, restored in 1994, seats 1,915. Designed by Frank Matcham, a renowned designer of theatres of the time, the Empire Palace Theatre originally opened its doors in November 1892. At that time, it could seat 3,000 people on four storeys.
In May of 1911, during a full house performance, fire broke out on the stage. While the 3,000 spectators managed to escape, eleven people died backstage, along with a lion in a cage who was waiting for its turn on stage. (A legend is connected with the fire as well. It is claimed that the ghost of one of its victims, Sigmund Neuberger – better known as the Great Lafayette – still haunts the premises today.)
The theatre reopened three days after the fire, but as a new medium, film, grew in popularity, the habits of the theatre-going public changed as well. Reusing some of Matcham’s original plans, the Empire Palace reopened in 1928 re-equipped to present bigger and more spectacular shows. The theatre’s first performance after the renovations was the famous – and then brand-new – musical “Show Boat” by Kern and Hammerstein. It then continued primarily as a venue for lighter entertainment, and was even used as a bingo hall for a time, with more serious artistic performances only happening during the festivals. It was only after its 1994 renovations and the nomination of a new, ambitious theatre director that it returned to its original vocation.
Online tickets
Buy tickets
