I wasn’t aware of a special musical focus on the Enlightenment, the Edinburgh Festival’s official theme, during my days there, though there was a concert for the Haydn anniversary. Baroque and romantic music dominated — Usher Hall concert performances of Handel’s Rinaldo and Verdi’s Macbeth, the first opera ever performed at the festival (in 1947); a puppet version of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria at the King’s Theatre; and a Queen’s Hall Chopin recital by Elisabeth Leonskaja.

The Usher Hall, such an acoustic relief after the bizarre Albert Hall, is still in refurbishment but opened specially for the festival. It proved less than fully functional, however, during the all-Haydn programme by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, conducted by the eternally genial and genius-like Roger Norrington, whose eccentric technique suggests a nutty traffic policeman but who is clearly inspirational. The tonal beauty of the period ensemble —horns with a fabulous golden crispness, strings not dissimilar —and his sense of paragraphing and propulsion made Symphonies Nos 48 and 49 arresting and alluring. He could not control what happened in the Scena di Berenice. Three times the platform lights failed, three times the thrillingly dramatic mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato tried and failed to get beyond the recitative to the aria. Many a diva would have stomped off, but DiDonato has a sense of humour. The audience roared gratitude and were rewarded with the interpolation of Handel’s Largo.

The hall had kept faith with an account by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Edinburgh Festival Chorus of Macbeth that ventured into the gallery for the Act III apparitions, and which sounded tremendous. The chorus rose to those uniquely Verdian heights of massed-voice passion. Susan Neves sang Lady Macbeth with a furious intensity that was certainly impressive even if it lacked the fiery articulative edge of a DiDonato, and Lado Ataneli mustered heroic vocal resources as Macbeth while still sounding stagy. But the work itself is a curious if invigorating blend of melodrama and a more searching musico-dramatic ambition, evident in the revision Verdi made for the Paris premiere. That was the version used here (though the programme didn’t spell it out), which meant we got the ballet music in Act III — happily, since the conducting by David Robertson, a musician of restless energy, a Verdi natural, accounted for much of the evening’s appeal.

A programme-book not clarifying what one heard caused confusion at the Queen’s Hall. Leonskaja played nothing but Chopin — her recital was supposed to reflect the one he gave in Edinburgh in 1848 — but she did not follow the printed order of Ballades, Nocturnes, Sonata and Polonaise-Fantasie. Applause broke in awkwardly after the first movement of the opening item, which was Sonata No 2, not Ballade No 2, and she didn’t look best pleased. Indeed, it was an interruption of a superbly dramatic, deeply pondered reading of this work, the Funeral March sonata, whose demoniac character she caught dazzlingly. That amazing finale in whooshing octaves can rarely have seemed so plausible as the scouring graveyard wind it is traditionally taken to be.

Rinaldo at the Usher Hall was a concert performance content not to venture beyond the platform or enliven a plain presentation, other than with the odd gesture. Not that the evocation of amorous and magical goings-on during the First Crusade lacked colour. The aerial arrival on a dragon-drawn chariot of the sorceress Armida was signalled by a bass-drum eruption, and her subsequent departure by a wind machine: a possibly inauth­entic touch in an account notable for acute period awareness and a lightness and electric fleetness of texture. There was birdsong for the Act I garden — very Respighi — and Masato Suzuki’s harpsichord solos for Armida’s aria Vo’ far guerra were spectacular.

The cast was terrific, in large part a suave, intimately nuanced symphony of high voices. The counter-tenors Clint van der Linde (in the title role), Damien Guillon and Robin Blaze shone with a baroque splendour, as did sopranos Rachel Nicholls, as Armida, and Maki Mori, as Rinaldo’s inamorata, Almirena. Her Lascia ch’io pianga was consummate; Van der Linde’s Cara sposa likewise. The opera is stuffed with good tunes — a so-called pasticcio that served as Handel’s calling-card when launching himself on London in 1711. It is a rather long calling card, it’s true, but that is in the nature of this static, repetitive art-form, with its campy concoction of stylised emotions. You may not adore Handel opera, but it’s hard to imagine it better done than with this brilliance and vim.