Edinburgh International Festival’s opening events were mesmerising

★★★★★If the rest of the Edinburgh International Festival matches its first 24 hours for audience excitement, innovation and pizzazz, it will be three weeks to remember. It started on Friday night when thousands gathered in the grounds of George Heriot’s School and watched that vast 17th-century edifice dance before their eyes, or seem to, before magically turning into rivers of lava, underground caverns and the panorama of Edinburgh itself.
This was Where to Begin, the spectacular opening event. Its computerised wizardry, accompanied by a megawatt soundtrack that cheerfully melded Wagner, Verdi, Scottish folk music and much else, came courtesy of Katy Fuller’s cutting-edge Pinwheel company. Nicola Benedetti, the EIF’s director, has declared this year’s motto to be “rituals that unite us”, and this one certainly did, while also having the essential quality of all great rituals of being totally mystifying.
Then on Saturday morning the countertenor superstar Jakub Jozef Orlinski and the superb instrumentalists of Il Pomo d’Oro opened the Queen’s Hall recital series by turning a lot of mostly obscure 17th-century Italian arias into one of the most entertaining concerts of baroque music Scotland can ever have heard. Orlinski’s voice isn’t to all tastes. At fortissimo it becomes a bit hooty. Yet his theatricality, flamboyance and athleticism are mesmerising.
He overdid it occasionally — for instance, sitting at the front of the stage and pretending to weep during an instrumental number. But by the time he delivered his prolonged encores, spiced by a couple of breakdancing moves, his audience was in raptures.
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So, for very different reasons, was the packed house for the EIF’s first Usher Hall concert: a superbly performed, musically fascinating and (considering its subject matter) strangely joyous account of La Pasion segun San Marcos by Osvaldo Golijov. The Argentinian composer wrote his St Mark Passion in 2000 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death. Most of it whirls along on a patter of exuberant Latin-American and African drumming with just a few passages conjuring a more ethereal soundworld.
The work’s chief glory, however, is the writing for voices. Under the conductor Joana Carneiro’s inspired direction the combined choirs (Schola Cantorum of Venezuela, National Youth Choir of Scotland) produced a remarkable range of sounds, from sublime unaccompanied unisons and lilting polychoral refrains to animalistic snarls. A terrific intercontinental partnership. Festival continues to August 25, eif.co.uk