Marsalis Opens Edinburgh Festival With 200-Performer 'All Rise'
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Wynton Marsalis, now 64, will open the Edinburgh International Festival at Usher Hall by joining the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and massed choirs — more than 200 performers total — for a revival of his 1999 symphony "All Rise," written for a 15-piece jazz band, 50-piece orchestra, and 100-piece choir across 12 movements.
- "All Rise" was first premiered at the turn of the millennium by the New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur, whom Marsalis credits with goading him to write the piece after the conductor saw a segregated New York and wanted music that "brought people together."
- Marsalis married Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti, the festival's director and 26 years his junior; their daughter Elise was born in May 2024, and Benedetti previously sent him a list of about 40 detailed notation revisions after the first run-through of a violin concerto he wrote for her.
- Marsalis recently announced he will step back from his executive leadership role at Jazz at Lincoln Center after nearly four decades running the orchestra and jazz programme, while remaining artistically involved during a transition period.
- The symphony draws on shared American dance traditions — tango, choro, ragtime, Anglo-Celtic fiddle music, New Orleans marches — and Marsalis insists it is not a polemic but a collaborative exercise, with orchestrator James Oliverio and bassoonist Milan Turković credited alongside Masur.
Why it matters: The festival's choice of "All Rise" — a work Marsalis conceived as a celebration of integration — as its opening statement lands in a cultural moment when, as the article puts it, "the very idea of common culture has begun to look quaint," giving the 200-plus performers a pointed civic assignment rather than a routine gala.
