Shows to watch today: Edinburgh Festival Bulletin, 6 August – Comedy highlights, Sidike Dembele, The Bamberger Symphoniker

Letters to our Future Government For this highly ambitious project, young people from across the UK and Ireland were invited to share their “urgent demands, must-hear truths and hopes for what comes next”, in the form of letters, poems, songs and speeches. Over the next few days, an ensemble cast at the Traverse will perform a selection of their writing, “all created in rapid response to our ever changing world”. Traverse Theatre, today until 11 August, 10.30am

Sidike Dembele The EIF’s Hub Club programme continues with a festival debut for the West African multi-instrumentalist. The Hub, 8pm

Hans Rott’s First Symphony The Bamberger Symphoniker is in residence at the EIF this week, with three concerts plus a family-friendly "Beyond the Score" event, all at the Usher Hall. It begins tonight with a little known symphony by the Austrian composer, alongside Bruckner’s Symphonic Prelude and Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, sung in German with English surtitles. Usher Hall, 7.30pm

And here’s a flavour of what you’ll find in the Edinburgh Festivals section of the website today:

For comedy lovers, Edinburgh in August can be the best of times and the worst of times. On the one hand, there are many hundreds of comedy shows in the Fringe programme – more than you could realistically fit into a year, let alone in a month. But then the eternal diemma: how to decide what to see? Fortunately, The Scotsman is here to help. As usual, our comedy critics are busy hunting down the best shows in town and telling us all about them in sparkling prose. This year, however, we're gathering together all of our four and five star comedy reviews in a user-friendly table, which you can find here. We'll be doing something similar with our Fringe theatre reviews soon, so watch this space.

Elsewhere on scotsman.com today, look out for Brian Ferguson's Festival Diary, which includes a good yarn about comedian Mark Watson and an unfortunate wedding proposal faux pas; Ken Walton's review of Carmen at the EIF; Fiona Shepherd's interview with musician Carla J Easton, in which she talks about her new documentary Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland's Girl Bands, coming soon to the Edinburgh International Film Festival and Joyce McMillan's round-up review of this year's Fringe programme at the Traverse Theatre.

That's not even scratching the surface of what's on offer though – for full immersion in The Scotsman Festival experience check out today's beautifully produced Festival supplement in the print edition of the paper, or pay us a virtual visit at www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/edinburgh-festivals.

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