Edinburgh Festival - Patrick O'Connor has Jacques Brel for breakfast

Edinburgh during the festival is not unlike Venice at carnival time. The pressure of the crowds along the Royal Mile - like those in San Marco - can seem uncomfortably aggressive. Yet walk a quarter of a mile away and you will find yourself in silent streets, apparently untouched for decades. Visitors intent on savouring every aspect of the festival compare notes in an anxious way. "What should I see?" "Have you heard of anything that's good?"

The official opening of the International Festival was on 12 August, but the Fringe and its spin-offs have been up and running since the start of the month. The relentless performances begin early in the morning. A clarinettist plays Jacques Brel outside my window before 9am. The patches for street performers are mysteriously marked out - the St Petersburg Baroque Brass Quintet gather a crowd whenever they appear. If someone doesn't book them for an inside gig, it will be a great disappointment. The contrast is stark between the ultra-respectable audience in the Usher Hall and the queues of spectators who gather at the Assembly Rooms in George Street, now the heart of the regular Fringe comedy stages. How many of the Lieder-lovers or opera groupies bother to explore the alternative fare on offer?

The first time I came to the festival, back in the 1960s, I arrived, as this year, on the afternoon train from London. Dashing to the Usher Hall, I asked one of the uniformed attendants where I might get a drink. He pointed to the gents and said: "There's a drinking fountain in there." Nowadays, the city is alive all night. Bars, clubs and internet cafes cater for insomniacs and bored tourists. One thing that has all but disappeared, sadly, are the little Italian cafes that used to serve strong coffee and home-made ice cream. Every few yards, there is a modern coffee shop. The rain drove me reluctantly into one of these, where a medium cappuccino cost £2.l5. Time was, that would have bought you a front-row seat to hear Karajan and the Berlin Phil.

But back to the Usher Hall, where Berlioz's La prise de Troie, the first part of his epic Les Troyens (the second part was due six days later), received a full-blooded performance under the baton of Donald Runnicles, accompanied by the lusty Edinburgh Festival Chorus. In the role of Cassandra, the much-publicised American mezzo-soprano Petra Lang gave a convincing portrayal. Lang seems poised to graduate to dramatic soprano parts (she certainly has the range), and it will be interesting to see if she manages the transition. Her Chorebus was the increasingly impressive Christopher Maltman, but the climax of the evening was the scene between Aeneas (Hugh Smith) and the ghost of Hector, sung by the Canadian bass John Relyea. Concert opera is not to everyone's taste, but Berlioz's work is well suited to it, and the imagination can supply the Trojan horse, the death of Laocoon and the torching of the city better than most stagings.

In its first week, the festival seemed intent on sticking to the ancient world. The second concert was Mozart's Idomeneo, conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras, a performance that came near to perfection. Appearing in the title role was Ian Bostridge. His haunted-poet good looks hardly suggest the character of the King of Crete, but his singing was eloquent and passionate - the final aria, "Torna la pace al core", filled the hall with its pure beauty. Although the audience went wild for Barbara Frittoli's Elettra, the most complete and accomplished portrayal was by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson as Idamante. She combined ardent pride with bewildered anguish in exact proportion.

Back at the Assembly, the queue was stretching round the block to hear Boothby Graffoe and Antonio Forcione in a late-night presentation of songs and jokes. Graffoe's play, The Condition of the Virgin, is one of the talked-about dramas this year, a sad, sometimes violent dialogue about belief, superstition and the problems facing a provincial priest when he finds that the statue of the Virgin Mary in his churchyard is pregnant. This, at least, has something to offend everyone. Wading through the Fringe programme, it is hard to see what some of the shows are out to achieve. There is a surprising number of young performers evoking stars of the past - with "tributes" to, among others, Judy Garland, Robert Helpmann, Marilyn Monroe, Quentin Crisp (the excellent Bette Bourne) and Frank Sinatra.

Escape down the hill, away from the crowds, and at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery there is an exhibition of exquisite good taste and gentle good humour called "Return to Life: a new look at the portrait bust". Here, the accent is not so much on art history as on an exploration of how people have been conditioned to ignore these sculptures, to see them, in some way, as all-purpose heads on endless plinths. The recipe is simple, but the effect stimulating and almost spooky. The heads are grouped not by artist or by epoch, but more to show their expressions, to suggest mood and personality. There are some wonderful faces, Albert Toft's bust of Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham contrasting splendidly with Gaudier-Brzeska's head of Horace Brodzky.

The big draws for the second week of the festival will be the New York City Ballet, in programmes of new work, and Vienna's Burgtheater, in a dramatisation of Thomas Bernhard's Alte Meister, the story of a man who goes to the Kunsthistorisches Museum every other day, always to look at the same Tintoretto. There are concerts conducted by Boulez, Haitink and Mackerras. And there is Handel in Dublin, one of three events that attempt to recreate the mood of concerts in the composers' own time - Messiah was originally presented with two of Handel's organ concertos.

People may criticise the Edinburgh Festival for being unselective in its range of theatre and music, but no one can say it lacks excitement.

The Edinburgh International Festival (0131 473 2000) runs until 1 September

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