A year of myths rather than hits

A triumphant 'Parsifal' and Angela Hewitt playing the 'Goldburg Variations' were among the highlights of the Edinburgh International Festival

It was touted as the most ambitious production ever to hit the Edinburgh International Festival - which, after more than half a century of innovative, inspired and occasionally inexplicable progamming, is quite some billing. But then there has never been anything modest about Wagner's final opera. Parsifal weighs in at a hefty five and a quarter hours and its plot, a morbid late-Romantic meditation on the fate of the Knights of the Holy Grail, moves at a pace that is most kindly described as "stately". Into the bargain, the opera has, over the past 100 years or so, been saddled with more outlandish interpretative gobbledygook than any artefact of Western culture except maybe Star Trek. It has been accused of misogyny, homo-eroticism and anti-Semitism, while Wagner himself helpfully labelled it "a stage-consecrating festival drama" - all of which might lead the discriminating operagoer to conclude that Parsifal is no picnic.

Yet as an excited crowd gathered outside Edinburgh's Festival Theatre at half-past four on an unusually sunny Thursday afternoon, picnicing was the order of the day, with a coterie of happy campers perched on the steps of the building eating sandwiches, ice creams and noodles out of plastic containers. Many of these had shelled out £100 sterling for the privilege of attending the last word in operatic luxury: Salzburg Festival's production of Parsifal, directed by Peter Stein, with top-of-the-range singers and the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra conducted by superstar baton-wielder Claudio Abbado. "A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity", as the programme, rather unnecessarily, pointed out.

Was it worth it? "Yes" would be too small a word. True, as a piece of theatre, the whole thing was shockingly tacky. Towards the end of Act One, the trees of the "sacred forest" bumped off stage left, to be replaced by what looked suspiciously like a giant piece of orange four-by-four, while the Grail Castle itself was a dead ringer for something Handy Andy might knock up with a staple gun and a roll of Sellotape - more Changing Rooms than Transformation Scene. The costumes were almost uniformly awful, the lighting somewhere between bilious and brutal, and nobody, with the exception of the German bass Eike Wilm Schulte as a Klingsor straight out of the Slytherin school of slimy baddies, bothered to act.

On the vocal front the Lithuanian mezzo Violeta Urbana stole the show, carrying off the fiendishly difficult role of slave/seductress Kundry with absolute conviction, while Thomas Moser's Parsifal alternated spear-wielding heroics with phrases of thrilling gentleness, and Albert Dohmen's Amfortas, his white robe saturated with blood which gushed with gut-clenching realism from the wound in his side, cut a memorably human figure. There was also an interesting innovation in the use of a couple of boy trebles as pages instead of the usual sopranos, adding another layer of clarity to the already shimmering soundscape.

But from the opening chords of the Act One Prelude it was clear that the evening was going to be a triumph for both conductor and orchestra. Wrapped in a cocoon of seamlessly beautiful sound, the audience sat spellbound as the long phrases unfolded, note by languorous note. Here was a performance which lived up to Virginia Woolf's description of Parsifal as an opera "poured out in a smooth stream at white heat"; a single, coherent musical utterance in which, in the words of the libretto itself, "space and time are one". To maintain this kind of sustained intensity under any circumstances would be a rare achievement. That Abbado did it with an orchestra whose members are all aged under 26, and that he did it despite - or perhaps because of - an ongoing personal battle with cancer, was something approaching a miracle. Arguments will always rage about what Wagner intended to achieve with this ground-breaking work, but there can be no doubt that he intended it to be an uplifting experience: and Abbado's Parsifal had us walking on air.

Meanwhile, over at the Usher Hall, there was another flash of genius; a series of late-night classical concerts by Premier League musicians with tickets priced at - get this - a fiver. A fiver will just about buy you a dodgy curry in Edinburgh, so an hour-long helping of Alfred Brendel, Joanna MacGregor, Jonas Kaufman, Christian Tetzlaff and a host of others for the same money made for a pretty tasty deal. Not surprisingly, the punters turned up in droves. On Friday evening the Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt played Bach's Goldberg Variations to a packed house. Sheathed in a slim-fitting raspberry cocktail gown, her dark hair piled high, diamonds sparkling at her earlobes, Hewitt looked like a flamenco dancer who had strayed in out of some Fringe extravaganza, but her fluid, precise playing and apparently bottomless box of tonal colours reminded the hall why the Sunday Times called her "the Bach pianist par excellence of her generation". It was half-past 11 when she finished, but they were still yelling for more, so she sat calmly down and played Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring as if, instead of a charred old burnt-out chestnut, it were something pristine and new.

A pair of very palpable hits, then, in a year where hits have been hard to come by at Edinburgh. The festival's first two big mainstream theatre pieces have, to put it mildly, met with mixed reviews. Grid Iron Theatre Company offered a new play, Variety, by local hero Douglas Maxwell, whose Decky Does A Bronco swept all before it at the 2000 Fringe festival. Grid Iron prides itself on its site-specific productions - Decky has been performed in swing parks all over the UK and, indeed, in Ireland - and Maxwell's tribute to the last days of music hall is set in a decrepit variety theatre on the night before is it due to be converted into a cinema. For the sake of verisimilitude the author thought it might be a good idea to board up Edinburgh's famously rococo King's Theatre so that it would look derelict; the festival organisers, needless to say, thought otherwise, and the theatre was its usual curlicued self, though - incredibly, at prime-time on a Saturday evening - half-empty. The tepid atmosphere didn't help a play which, according to Maxwell, aims to deliver a series of short sharp bursts rather than a single loud bang. A hard-working cast delivered plenty chuckles and some poignant moments - notably when two former lovers launched into a despairing waltz lit in stark black and white - overall, though, none of it compensated for the play's over-reliance on cartoonish characterisations and (is it still uproariously funny at the beginning of the 21st century?) the F-word.

If Variety was a very Scottish confection, The Girl on the Sofa bore - at least on paper - all the hallmarks of a Europudding. The Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse is the trendiest thing on the continental stage, with over 100 productions of his works treading the boards this year alone; director Thomas Ostermeier has been making a name for himself as a perceptive interpreter of new drama in Germany; and the English version - not "translation", mind - of the play was commissioned from the Scottish playwright David Harrower by Edinburgh's cutting-edge Traverse Theatre. As it turns out, it is Ostermeier who has garnered the plaudits at Edinburgh for his haunting, balletic production at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, beautifully acted by a superb ensemble cast.

At the centre of the play is a woman who is suffering from painter's block. Figures from her past - including her younger self, her dead parents, her elder sister and a marvellously sleazy uncle, played with creepy relish by Daniel Cerquiera - flit in and out of a cleverly multi-layered set, but despite its quick-fire dialogue and vivid characterisation, The Girl on the Sofa stubbornly refused to soar. Perhaps it's the subject matter. An absent father, an adulterous mother, the inevitable divorce - all very regrettable, but hardly the stuff of tragedy. By contrast David Greig's beautiful, funny, elegiac piece Outlying Islands, set on a remote Scottish island just before the second World War, has ensured packed houses at the Traverse, and made itself the talk of the Fringe in the process, by posing some pertinent questions about the way we live now.

If commissioning new theatre is a risky business, reviving neglected opera is a real leap into the dark, and it's hard to imagine any other festival except Edinburgh taking a chance on George Enescu's Oedipe. Enescu has always enjoyed a kind of minor celebrity as the composer of the showy, folksy Romanian Rhapsodies and as Yehudi Menuhin's violin teacher, but recent recordings have been uncovering orchestral music of great variety and, at its best, a subtle delicacy in the Debussy/Scriabin mould. None of which hints at the jaw-dropping scale of Oedipe. At four acts and three hours, its length is verging on the Wagnerian, while the orchestral forces it demands are staggering - full orchestra plus piano, harmonium, celesta and glockenspiel, plus a musical saw, a whip, an alto sax and a wind machine.

The cost of assembling this musical menagerie may explain why Oedipe has had to wait 70 years for its British premiere, and may well prevent the piece from ever getting a full staging - even at Edinburgh. In concert at the Usher Hall, the impression at times was of special effects overload. When Oedipus (another fiendish role pluckily, and often poetically, sung by John Relyea) despatched the Sphinx, the musical saw took up her cries with such startling suddenness that she appeared doomed to expire in a fit of hiccups, while the wind machine - presumably intended to conjure up a sinister bleakness at the crossroads where the hero will shortly kill his father - managed instead to give the impression that somebody backstage was going bananas with a hoover.

Add an enormous choir to this volatile mix and you got a swirl of sound which often went nowhere and sometimes swamped the soloists but which, when it worked, was exhilarating. The scene in which Oedipus discovered the awful truth about his past, and dashed offstage to blind himself, was everything drama should be - terrifying, tragic and cathartic. With a highly-praised Canadian production of Stravinsky's operatic take on this timeless tale, Oedipus Rex, due to hit the stage at the Playhouse next Thursday, and Abbado's Grail-cool Parsifal causing such topics as atonement, redemption and the nature of spirituality to be discussed in the most unlikely places - including the local deli - maybe this is a year for myths rather than hits at Edinburgh.

The Edinburgh International Festival continues until August 31st, www.eif.co.uk