Opera at the Edinburgh International Festival

The festival starts off at the Usher Hall with a concert performance of Brecht's and Weill's Rise and Fall of The City of Mahagonny, conducted by HK Gruber and starring Susan Bickley and Sir Willard White (8 August).

At the Edinburgh Festival Theatre, Smetana's The Two Widows is directed by Tobias Hoheisel (who also provides the designs) and Imogen Kogge and conducted by Francesco Corti, Scottish Opera's new music director. Based on a French drawing room comedy, Smetana infuses the comic tale of two poles-apart widows (one - Karolina - looking to the future, the other - Anezka - with her head buried in the past) with Bohemian charm, as a mysterious stranger appears in their lives and Karolina guesses what he's up to (9, 11 & 12 August).

Valery Gergiev's second Festival residency (following his LSO Prokofiev Symphony cycle) is with his Mariinsky Opera, opening at the Usher Hall with a concert double-bill. Rachmaninov's Aleko, starring Evgeny Nikitin, Irina Mataeva and Mikhail Petrenko, is paired with Act III of Prokofiev's shocking war-set Semyon Kotko (with Victor Lutsiuk in the title role and Irina Mataeva as Sofiya).

Back at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre, Gergiev conducts two performances of Mariusz Trelinski's Warsaw National Theatre production of Symanowski's King Roger (Król Roger), which transferred to the Mariinsky stage during the White Nights festival earlier this year. It tells the exotic tale of the Catholic king holding out against the hedonistic alternative pedalled by the Shepherd (who turns out to be Dionysus) and stars Andrzej Dobber as Roger, Elzbieta Szmytka as Roxana and Pavlo Tolstoy as the Shepherd (25 & 27 August).

The Mariinsky residency also includes the UK concert première of Rodion Shchedrin's 2002 opera, The Enchanted Warrior, based on Nickolai Leskov's novella, a folktale extravaganza complete with balalaika, gusli (zither) and an epic plot including seduction, murder, omens and destiny (Edinburgh Festival Theatre, 26 August).

Finally, the Royal Lyceum Theatre sees the world première of Heiner Goebbels' I went to the house but did not enter, produced by the Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne and featuring the Hilliard Ensemble. A regular visitor to Edinburgh, Goebbels here uses texts by T S Eliot, Maurice Blanchot and Samuel Beckett as well as both medieval and contemporary music to define 'I' in our confusing, shifting world (28-30 August).

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