SOME OPERAS can sustain interest as a concert performance but Purcell's The Fairy Queen felt incomplete without the over-the-top scenery, visual effects and dance interludes it was written for.

IT MIGHT not be quite up there with watching paint dry, but the monotony of the late Herbert Wernicke's operatic concoction of Bach cantatas for Stuttgart Opera was the overwhelming factor in this re-staging.

FINALLY, a concert from the Usher Hall series to write home about. What a pity it took until Saturday's final opportunity.

DIVERSITY in a triple bill is always a good thing, allowing different tastes to be catered for during one evening.

YESTERDAY morning's concert by the Emerson Quartet was one of the most phenomenal chamber music experiences of this year's  International Festival. In the 200th anniversary year of his birth, it was as if they were probing deep into Felix Mendelssohn's psyche.

THE Sixteen were cut in half for their appearance in the Bach at Greyfriars series on Thursday evening.

CONDUCTOR John Eliot Gardiner deployed the forces of the English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir like a supreme military strategist, moving them around the stage during the performances to present this glorious music in the best possible light.

IF IT is surprising that Giorgio Battistelli's Experimentum Mundi, first performed in 1981, hasn't been seen in Edinburgh until now, it may be because the cast can't get time off work.

AS A classic Scottish lad o' pairts, setting off from humble origins to find fame and fortune in London, JM Barrie of Kirriemuir was in many ways a child of  the Enlightenment.