Edinburgh international festival 2013 line up announced. Punk poet Patti Smith, Leonardo da Vinci and a Beijing production of Coriolanus that features not one but two Chinese heavy metal bands are all set to be highlights of this year’s Edinburgh international festival, in a summer exploring the connections between artists and the cutting-edge technology of their times – from Beethoven’s writing for the new steel-framed pianos of his day to Samuel Beckett’s works for the radio.

The festival, which runs from 9 August to 1 September, will begin withValery Gergiev conducting Prokofiev’s film score of Eisenstein’s 1938 epic Alexander Nevsky. It will then present Opéra de Lyon’s production of Beethoven’s Fidelio – an opera that, with its focus on “freedom, good and evil” is the perfect work for our time, according to the festival’s artistic director Jonathan Mills. “It is about rendition, torture, the suspension of habeas corpus; people sent to prison for no reason by a powerful despot.”