More money than ever before was taken at the Edinburgh International Festival box office in 2008. The final figure at the box office is estimated to be £2.63m.

Heiner Goebbels, the German avant-garde composer, has transposed texts from four of the most influential writers of the 20th century - T S Eliot, Maurice Blanchlot, Franz Kafka, and Samuel Beckett - and created three tableaux pieces sung by the all-male Hilliard Ensemble.

A quartet of young Israeli musicians making their Edinburgh International Festival debut today were forced to stop playing on seve

This year's International Festival slogan is "artists without borders," which is why the appearance of cultural ambassadors for Israel - the Jerusalem Quartet - provoked a pro-Palestinian demonstration outside the Queen's Hall this morning as most Palestinian citizens do not have the same freedom of movement as Israelis, living as they do within confined borders. An unusual introduction to a morning chamber recital, the pavements thronged with placards and leaflets.

The Edinburgh International concert at the Usher Hall last night should have included Schumann's Piano Concerto, but with no notification to the audience, other than a slip of paper in the programme, and no apology, the piece was changed to Beethoven's 4th Piano concerto.

Today's recital at the Queen's Hall had to be changed at the last minute due to the original performer, Ivan Moravec, being ill. However, Steven Osborne, the accomplished Scottish pianist was able to step in at short notice.

It is probably unique for the composer to take a curtain call at the premiere of an opera at the Edinburgh Festival.

Concert performances of operas are often merely static shadows of fully-staged performances, but this double-bill by the Mariinsky Opera was a revelation.

Oscar Wilde's 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is a tale of the obsessive need to remain youthful and how a soul can be corrupted when that person no longer accepts the disfigurement

The Edinburgh Festival goes out each year with literally many, very large bangs, in its annual Festival Fireworks Concert.

The final allocation of tickets for the Bank of Scotland Fireworks Concert go on sale tomorrow at 10.00am. Tickets will be available only from the counter of the Hub.

Ruhe - which means "silence" in German - is an extraordinary piece of theatre. It deals with the thorny subject of Dutch citizens voluntarily collaborating with the SS Brownshirts during the second world war after Holland had been invaded by the Nazis. The performance juxtaposes a selection of Schubert's serene "partsongs" with monologues taken from transcripts of interviews with the volunteers.

The Queen's Hall chamber series today featured a father and daughter recital - Mischa Maisky on cello and Lily Maisky playing the piano.

This welcome return by Scottish Opera to the Edinburgh Festival after too-long an absence was better-than well received by a capacity audience, causing frequent laughter throughout Smetana's comedy of manners.

Tazieh is the folk-drama of Shi'a Islam, in which the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the grandson of Prophet Muhammed, is a central focus and essential element. Looking at Tazieh, however, is a documentary in which the audience figures as much, if not more, than the action they watch.

There are fine theatrical moments in Jidariyya, from the opening in a hospital emergency room to its close. The journey of a soul is, of course, a frequent and time-honoured motif in the literature of all cultures, and Mahmoud Darwish's poetry nods frequently toward a variety of sources.

Georgian sacred and folk music is quite distinctive. Unlike European and other a cappella songs, their harmonies sound discordant at times, but that is what makes their music so unique.

Israel in Egypt, the fifth of the nineteen oratorios which George Frideric Handel composed in England, was written in 1738, the composition of the whole colossal work occupying but twenty-

Festival Director Jonathan Mills made a bold choice in opening his second festival with this bitter satire on capitalism and decadent society - and one he is reported to have had in mind since his appointment.

Today's concert at the Queen's Hall was with the Venezuelan pianist Gabriel Montero.