Edinburgh International Festival
14 August - 6 September 2009 

The Edinburgh International Festival - or "official" Festival to its friends - published its 2009 programme last week.  Not to be confused with the larger, brasher Festival Fringe, the resolutely highbrow International Festival runs for three weeks in August and September each year.  FringeGuru's Richard Stamp shares his thoughts on this year's line-up.

An ambitiously-staged performance of Faust is an intriguing highlight of this year's programme. Photo courtesy Edinburgh International Festival

And for once, we can judge a book by its cover: the much-discussed and very pink "toile" enveloping this year's programme is a knowing metaphor for what lies within.  On the surface a series of unthreatening, even bucolic, images of Edinburgh, close inspection reveals a darker undertone: a drunkard relieves himself on Greyfriars' Bobby, a vagrant sleeps at the feet of David Hume.

And so it is with the year's events.  Themed on the Enlightenment, director Jonathan Mills' third Festival first comes across as an upbeat, approachable - dare I say it, populist - programme.  Banish all memories of those Prokofiev marathons last year; 2009 is heavy on hummable baroque.  Even Bryn Terfel, for goodness' sake, pops up to sing Loch Lomond - a booking which will surely have the highbrow purists huffing into their port.

The Scottish Ballet appear in this year's line-up. Photo courtesy Edinburgh International Festival

There's a faintly subversive backdrop to all this - for 2009 is the Year of Homecoming, a tourism-led initiative to persuade the Scots diaspora to pay a visit home.  Festival director Jonathan Mills has played along to an extent, but this was never going to be a Saltire-clad homage for the misty-eyed.  There's no Burns, no Scott; the diaspora celebrated in multimedia glory is drawn from around the world, and the return home is that of Ulysses, retold in both opera and dance.

Intriguingly, too, I sense a gentle change in focus, an incursion into the territory usually held by the Fringe.  It's not just that the Traverse Theatre, long the Fringe's most prestigious stage, had hooked up with the "official" Festival this year.  I'm struck too by the ambitious promenade Faust, staged in the massive Lowland Hall near the airport at Ingliston; exactly the kind of out-there, once-only spectacular where the Fringe, usually, excels.

And we mustn't forget visual art.  Controversially absent for nigh-on twenty years, it saw a faltering return in 2007, with artworks incongruously strewn around the streets of Edinburgh.  It took a rest in 2008, but this time perhaps it's back to stay - coming in from the cold to the august surroundings of the city's Dean Gallery.  It's a varied and, almost inevitably, rampantly contemporary programme, which looks set for the first time to give the burgeoning rival Edinburgh Art Festival a genuine run for it's money.

Like the toile, Jonathan Mills has delivered an intricately-woven programme, elegant but full of hidden meaning.  So how to draw the threads together?  I won't even try; it's an impossible task.  You'll need to make your own mind up: so get your hands on the brochure, and join me in eager anticipation of this August.

Richard Stamp is FringeGuru's co-founder and a self-confessed addict of the Festival and Fringe.