Jonathan Mills, the new director of the Edinburgh International Festival, will use his first programme to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the birth of opera. Beginning with Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo, widely regarded as the first recognisable opera, he has assembled concerts and stage performances which both celebrate the music of the period and modern takes on the myths, including the story of Orpheus, which inspired early opera composers.

“My inspiration was Monteverdi’s Orfeo, he said at the launch of the programme in Edinburgh yesterday, “not just as a celebration of its 400th anniversary but as an exploration of its legacy still alive in the work of artists today”.

Among other ancient and modern parallels, a radical version of the story of Dido and Aeneas, based on an opera by Cavalli but performed in space-suits by a radical theatre troupe, the Wooster Group from New York, sits cheek by jowl with concert performances of Purcell’s 17th century opera on the same subject. In dance, the French Compagnie Montalvo-Hervieu bring their decadent folly based on the works of early French opera composer Jean-Philippe Rameau.

It is the first time, a festival director has attempted to theme large sections of the festival since the late Sir John Drummond’s glorious Vienna 1900 season in 1983.

Other innovations include the return of the visual arts to the festival for the first time for more than a decade. Site specific installations by Michael Lin, Apolonija Susteric and Richard Wright around the theme of Jardins Public (public gardens — of which Edinburgh’s Princes Street Gardens is a world famous example) have been specially commissioned.

Scottish audiences will welcome the return of Alan Cumming, now a Hollywood star, to his home stage for the first time in 17 years in a new production of Euripides’ The Bacchae by the National Theatre of Scotland. The show will be directed by John Tiffany who won the Critics Circle award as best director for the NTS’s Black Watch, about the Scottish regiment of the same name, on last year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Lovers of the theatrical avant-garde will be excited by the appearance of Lee Breuer’s Mabou Mines troupe from New York with their interpretation of Ibsen’s A Dolls House in which all the men are under 5 ft tall and all the women are over 5ft 7in, giving physical expression to the gender politics of the original.

Other local input comes from the Scottish Ballet, several orchestras and Theatre Cryptic, in a co-production with the T’ang Quartet from Singapore There are still symphony concerts in the Usher Hall, morning chamber music concerts in the Queen’s Hall, dance at the Festival Theatre and theatre performances at the Royal Lyceum and the King’s. Some had feared that Mr Mills, 43, an Australian composer and academic, whose most recent festival experience was running the Melbourne festival, would rip up the blueprint completely.

In fact, although he has brought the opening concert forward by two days and put the closing fireworks concert back by one day, the 100 performances across seven venues, and the talks and lectures, will be recognisable to festival goers anywhere, even in its newly designed brochure.

His only concession to his home country is a single concert by the guitarist John Williams. Mr Mills said: “Festivals are a gift; a special gift from a city to itself, to its citizens to its visitors, to its future. I hope audiences will have a fantastic time. I hope the city will take the 2007 festival to its heart.”