Edinburgh needs a new dawn

There is no direct flight from Edinburgh to Salzburg. That is symbolic, since the world's premier arts festivals are heading in opposite directions. Salzburg this summer suffered a slow run of opera flops while quietly restoring its concert and theatre programme to peak form. Edinburgh had any number of blips, not least an electronic box-office failure which caused financial crisis at the Fringe and a cavalcade of signing politicians which put the book festival on security alert.

There was no ignoring the large black cloud that hung over the International Festival which, year by year, is losing its lustre. Whatever the ups and downs of one show or another, the underlying narrative of Salzburg and Edinburgh this summer was a tale of two festivals, one of which is urgently renewing itself while the other determinedly ignores the overhanging storm warning.

Salzburg has just undergone its third makeover in as many decades. Herbert von Karajan's death in 1989 gave way to a glorious era of modernist mischief under Gérard Mortier, only for dour Peter Ruzicka to turn the clock back in 2001 with blingy stars and blatant commercialism meant to lure rich Germans away from Bayreuth and Lucerne.

His 2006 Mozart year featured all 22 operas by the little periwig and broke all box-office records, mostly with Asian online bookings. But Ruzicka shot his bolt with Amadeus overkill and was replaced last year by the thoughtful theatre director Jürgen Flimm, who set about rekindling a sense of adventure. Despite suffering bling failure in the big operas — Anna Netrebko pulled out pregnant (see CDs of the week, right) and Rolando Villazón is struggling with his devils — elsewhere the festival was in a ferment of transformation.

Our own National Theatre made its first Salzburg appearance with Vanessa Redgrave in Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Another National play, Simon Stephens's bleak Harper Regan, was staged in German. Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize winner for literature, was in residence for a week and English was very much the lingua franca — so much so that, at the end of a riveting Brahms recital, the baritone Thomas Quasthoff addressed his rapt audience in what he called "the international tongue". This, in Karajan times, would have led to summary dismissal.

Despite exorbitant ticket prices, typically £150-£300 at the opera, there has been a marked relaxation of dress code, with open collars speckling the phalanx of black ties; and while radical productions still get loudly booed — as Jossi Weiler and Sergio Morabito found when they set Dvorak's Rusalka in a submarine brothel — the old guard has lost its grip on the festival and Karajan's centenary was tolled in low key.

Masterclasses have been set up for young singers and directors and Salzburg is looking more than ever before at the next generation. But most significant culture change is to be found in the concert programme, where the pianist Markus Hinterhäuser has come in from the Salzburg Fringe, which he invented in 1991 to oblige maestro egos to attempt something different.

His principal triumph was a week of music by Salvatore Sciarrino, a 60-ish Sicilian who works isolated sound fragments into hypnotic mazes, the last of which, a cycle of vocal aphorisms, was magnificently conducted by Simone Young.

Sciarrino never gets heard in regular concert halls. Hinterhäuser's pitch is that to hear music as different as this you have to go to Salzburg.

Next year he's getting Daniel Barenboim and Riccardo Muti to revive the lost music of the French-American Edgard Varèse. You won't hear it anywhere else.

Edinburgh, by contrast, has few unique selling points. The centre of its international music programme, Valery Gergiev's survey of the Prokofiev symphonies, can be heard again next month in London. Gergiev's opera highlight, a Russian production of the Polish masterpiece King Roger, also had the stamp of a second-hand rose. Matthew Bourne's new Dorian Gray is heading next to Sadler's Wells.

The festival's theme was a Europe without borders but, even without the Russians inconveniently redrawing the Caucasus map in mid-August, the menu seemed no more than a bag of Baltic and Balkan mixed allsorts and the programme introductions by director Jonathan Mills added little by way of coherence. A headline Polish production of the Jewish classic play, The Dybbuk, struck me as borderline anti-Semitic in its faint sneers at Chassidic tradition.

The Fringe, too, was having a hard time, not from computer crashes so much as paucity of experiment. The top acts consisted of superannuated TV celebrities making one last pitch for the jaded eye of industry moguls. The art galleries had little to compel my attention apart from an ill-hung show of inter-war European photography and there would have been gaps in my day were it not for the consistent scintillation of the book festival — a world leader — and the intense dramaturgy that prevails at the Traverse Theatre, which is neither official festival nor Fringe but a determinedly independent powerhouse. A verse play from Dublin's Abbey Theatre, Terminus by Mark O'Rowe, intoxicated me with the exuberance of its language.

Against the satellite attractions of so many other festivals, Edinburgh International (EIF) now risks slipping into insignificance. When Jonathan Mills was appointed director in March 2006 I warned that the inexperienced Australian would arrive naked at the high table with few cards to play. Mills has, in difficult circumstances, made a decent fig-leaf of his first two years but the EIF has drifted in that time from budgetary difficulties to full-blown existential crisis.

Nobody, least of all Mills himself, can define what the festival is there for or why we should go when so much of its work is available closer to home. What Edinburgh needs is a strategic overhaul and a statement of future purpose that will require greater intellectual capacities than Mills is capable of providing. While Salzburg has renewed itself in each of the past three decades, Edinburgh lives off its past. Where Salzburg is genuinely international in scope and standard of performance, Edinburgh is becoming steadily provincialised, smug in its transparent limitations.

There was once a time when Salzburg was so scared of the Edinburgh threat that, according to newly released documents, it sought to trademark the word "festival" under international law. These days, lamentably, EIF is no threat to anyone. Edinburgh is barely in the league of premier festivals, and falling fast.

The Edinburgh International Festival runs until Sunday. www.eif.co.uk