This is upheavals year for Britain’s top festivals. Two big musical jamborees – the Proms and Cheltenham – are losing their directors. The Edinburgh International Festival has a new boss after 16 years of Brian McMaster, an engagingly opinionated Aussie called Jonathan Mills. And there’s a new kid on the block: the biennial Manchester International Festival. Provocatively billed as the world’s “first international festival of original new work”, it has been masterminded by Alex Poots, a Scot with bags of ideas and sacks of Manchester City Council’s dosh.

Both Mills and Poots have unveiled their plans for their debut festivals. They don’t overlap (Manchester is in early July, Edinburgh in August). But because both are programmed by bright young men in a hurry, they have inevitably been portrayed as rivals: Edinburgh the 60-year-old monster keen to reinvigorate itself before it is usurped by its sprawling Fringe; Manchester the newcomer intent on making a massive splash on its first attempt. Is that how their directors see it?

“I’m not worried about Manchester,” says Mills, a composer and academic who ran the Melbourne Festival before being headhunted for Edinburgh. “Getting people into the habit of thinking that festivals are a good idea is good for everyone.”

Manchester’s maestro, too, seems relaxed about comparisons with Edinburgh (his home town, as he wryly points out). “Edinburgh largely celebrates great works of the past,” Poots says. “We are all about creating works of the future. Besides, I think Manchester may be a blessing in disguise for Edinburgh. Our existence allows the Edinburgh Festival people to go to their city council and say: ‘Look, Manchester is putting £2 million into its festival and it may not even be a success. We can’t sit on our laurels.’ ” The financial point is crucial, because Poots has been spectacularly successful at raising money. Besides Manchester City Council’s £2 million, he has extracted £3.5 million from the private sector and £750,000 from the Arts Council. With expected box office receipts of around £2.5 million he has £9 million to splurge on his 18-day cultural binge (Edinburgh’s pot is £8.2 million for 23 days).

Poots is going to need it. Mounting 25 specially commissioned shows will be monstrously expensive, and there’s no guarantee that they will all succeed. So why risk a whole festival of new work? “Because Manchester has always been a city of firsts. And because if you don’t commission new work you end up with a museum culture.”

No danger of that in Manchester this July. Poots (whose most famous exploit to date was getting English National Opera to sing Wagner at the Glastonbury Festival) has concocted a series of bizarre but potentially brilliant collaborations by apparently disparate talents. There’s Damon Albarn writing an opera involving 45 Chinese acrobats ( see feature, page 13). There’s Carlos Acos-ta mixing it with X Alfonso – “the world’s greatest male ballet dancer next to the world’s greatest hip-hop star”, as Poots puts it.

There’s the Hallé Orchestra premiering a new oratorio based on a Salman Rushdie novel and including a silent film by Mike Figgis. There’s a staging of The Pianist – Wladyslaw Szpilman’s Warsaw Ghetto memoir – in an 1830s warehouse. And so on. Add Lou Reed performing his album Berlinin Britain for the first time, and it’s clear that Poots has been persuasive as well as imaginative during his two years of planning.

Planning time was exactly what Mills didn’t have in Edinburgh. Appointed a year ago, he started full-time only in October – and found the cupboard bare. “Nothing was planned,” he says. “But I’m not apologising for what we have put together. I think it has coherence and integrity. That’s because, even if they are contacted at the last minute, performers still want to come here.”

Mills has done what he was presumably hired to do: put a sexy new frock on a somewhat stately old dowager. His underlying theme is Orfeo – the first great opera, which had its premiere 400 years ago – and the perennial questions it raises about the power of music versus words, and the place of artists in society. Edinburgh’s punters will get Monteverdi’s opera performed in full 17th-century fig by Jordi Savall’s Hesperion XXI. But there will also be more irreverent, postmodern treatments of the legend by the Trisha Brown Dance Company and the American Repertory Theatre, which tells the story in a rock’n’roll context.

Another pillar of the New York avant-garde scene, Lee Breuer, is staging Chekhov’s Doll’s Housewith all the male actors under 4ft 6in (1.37m) tall, and the females over 5ft 7in (1.7m) – apparently to show, Mills says, that “the men are content to be in the house, while the women’s imaginations are too large to be contained by it”.

The debunking of the classics continues with the Australian director Barrie Ko-sky’s Viennese cabaret version of Monteverdi’s Poppea and New York’s Wooster Group promising a “Fifties film noir” take on another Baroque opera, Cavalli’s La Di-done. Then there’s the choreographer William Forsythe offering what Mills calls “the history of Western civilisation in satirical dance form” in Impressing the Czar, and the cult comedy trio Tiger Lil-lies presenting A Tribute (of Sorts) to Monteverdi. But he has been careful to balance zany whimsicality with an eminently serious 6pm concert series in which a Who’s Who of early music groups traces the history of vocal music. He’s also revamped the 11am Queen’s Hall concerts to include a wider variety of music. And with Mariss Jansons bringing his Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Venezuelan whizzkid Gustavo Dudamel appearing with his remarkable Simón BolÍvar Youth Orchestra, the main evening concerts won’t lack excitement.

Mills has also scattered in this year’s programme a few hints about Edinburgh’s future direction: less “pan-European”, more global, with major links planned to Singa-pore and China; a new focus on sending festival productions on tour to the Highlands and Islands; and a few spectacular outdoor events to challenge the Fringe on its own patch. “I have next year’s festival virtually planned,” he says with a grin. If the sparks don’t fly while he’s around, I’ll be amazed.

Full details: www.eif.co.uk and www.manchesterinternationalfestival.com

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