The Queen's given everyone an extra bank holiday, so while you rest up over the Easter holidays, start planning your next downtime with theartsdesk's definitive clickable festival guide for the summer. We have headline listings and links for all the UK festivals this year, from rock by the lochs to DJs in London parks, and catching classical and opera on the way.

The Edinburgh International Festival runs this year from 9 August to 2 September, with an energetically global look. Forty-seven nations - around a third of the world's countries - are represented in a conscious reflection of the focus of the London Olympics.

New Royal Opera director Kasper Holten has announced a 2012-13 season in which big-name favourite operas and world opera stars are threaded through by 19th-century rarities and British operas. ROH music director Sir Antonio Pappano conducts a deliberate series of revivals, including Verdi masterpieces and four complete Ring cycles.

World premieres, new faces, lower ticket prices (and the first recycled opera production). The Royal Opera House announced a bullish attitude today as it enters the austerity post-Olympics period for next season with six ballet  premieres and six new opera productions. Ballet headlines are that the leading Russian choreographer of the era, Alexei Ratmansky, will create a work for the Royal Ballet - as will Christopher Wheeldon. Radical abstractionist Wayne McGregor will create his first narrative ballet, and the rising young Liam Scarlett will create his first full-length ballet.

Birmingham Royal Ballet has outlined its 2012-13 season for its home base in Birmingham, indicating a shrunken repertoire due to subsidy cuts, but with a new full-length family ballet by David Bintley, Aladdin.

The season will celebrate the art of storytelling, says the company, and some performances will have early starts to pitch at families. Only one mixed bill is announced, attesting to the damage done to the broader performance repertoire by the swingeing cuts in grant.

Touring dates and venues will be added.

Autumn-Winter 2012

English National Ballet's 2012 summer is studded with events to build new audiences, with a new version for children to introduce them to The Sleeping Beauty, collaborations with Tate Britain and hip hop, and a special Olympics event uniting Scotland, Wales and English in ballet.

Popular operatic love stories by Puccini, Wagner and Mozart dominate the regional scene in 2012, but key talents like producer Tim Albery in Leeds, Lothar Koenigs in Cardiff and David McVicar in Glasgow all promise significant stage experiences.

The National Theatre's summer highlights include Simon Russell Beale directed by Nicholas Hytner in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens and Julie Walters as an ageing society dropout in the debut stage play by TV writer Stephen Beresford, The Last of the Haussmans.

Spring 2012