Edinburgh: Art, music and theatre with Will Gompertz

It can be a bit difficult to sort through everything that's going on at Edinburgh's festivals, so we asked BBC Arts editor Will Gompertz for his list of the must-see shows, sights and exhibitions this August.

At the Edinburgh Art Festival, I'd recommend the Talbot Rice Gallery's exhibition of work by Alice Neel, a 20th-century American modernist painter whose subjects included her friends, lovers and colleagues. There’s also the conceptual Mexican sculptor Damian Ortega at the Fruitmarket, portraiture from Rembrandt to Ai Weiwei at the National Portrait Gallery, impressionism at the National Gallery, and surrealism at the National Gallery of Modern Art.

But if I was going to do one art thing, I would go outside Edinburgh, towards Glasgow, to Jupiter Artland. There’s a wonderful 100-acre space you can explore and enjoy, with sculptures throughout, including Andy Goldsworthy’s Stone House Bonnington. It looks like a straightforward shepherd’s cottage, but when you go inside, the floor is like the landscape of the moon, with rocks, craters and boulders – what he’s done is scraped away the topsoil, and that’s what’s really, really there. It’s quite extraordinary to see.

For pop music, there's Sigur Ros, the ambient and cool Icelandic band, and, right at the other end of the spectrum, Young Fathers, a Mercury Prize-winning band who are lively, wild and, well, a little bit rude.

As far as classical music’s concerned, there’s Wagner’s Das Rheingold as sung by the Mariinsky Opera, and Bach’s St Matthew Passion by the Monteverdi Choir, conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner.

There’s lots of really good theatre to look out for, too; if I was going to pick one thing, I’d go for Natalia Osipova, the Russian dancer. She’s performing with her boyfriend, Sergei Polunin. They’re only on for two nights, but honestly, they are the Nureyev and Fonteyn of our age – absolutely fantastic.

Finally, Anything That Gives Off Light is a show that I’ve not seen, but it sounds fascinating. It’s a collaboration between the National Theatre of Scotland and an American outfit called The TEAM, bringing together mythical tales of both cultures through the meeting of two strangers who then go up to the Highlands. I’ve seen quite a lot of the National Theatre’s work up in Edinburgh, and it’s always been fantastic, so I think this is likely to be a premier thing to go and see.