Live Music

The 2010 Edinburgh International Festival Fireworks Concert will this year celebrate "Music from the Movies", it was announced by Festival Director Jonathan Mills this morning at the launch of the EIF programme taking place in August and early September.

James Lowe conducted a concert of songs and string works from three composers who had to emigrate from their homeland because of political turmoil: Hans Gál from Germany, Sergei Rachmaninoff from Russia and Béla Bartok from Hungary. Between the music we heard, in their own words, what their displacement meant to them.

An estimated 220,000 people across the Scottish capital enjoyed the explosive finale to this year's Edinburgh International Festival and the summer festival season last night, the BoS Festival Fireworks Concert.

Tram works on Princes Street meant that many couldn't get as close as they wanted to the centrepoint of the show, Edinburgh Castle, but new vantage points were introduced and local radio stations Forth One and Forth 2 broadcast the concert live on the night, as in previous years.

Once again, I must admit to being drawn to a band largely on the strength of their name. Carolina Liar - where did that one come from? Well, a little research revealed that lead singer and guitarist - and while we're on the subject of names - the almost impossibly named Chad Wolf, originally hails from Charleson, South Carolina, so we're starting to see a connection here.

Ivo Pogorelich excites debate and controversy today as much as he did in 1980 at the Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition when Martha Argerich left the jury in protest when the young Croatian pianist was eliminated in the 3rd round. She described him then as a genius. Purists may disagree.

At any other time of the year it would have looked an odd sight - a snake of folk in Thistle Street carrying champagne flutes, trouping into Henderson's Restaurant.

Although not listed in the Fringe programme, the Cowgate Cartoon music show makes perfect Fringe entertainment. Run by Will Pickvance, in the intimate atmosphere of the Underground Café in the Cowgate, each night is a different line-up of musicians and poets. And it's all free (a bucket is passed around).

The nineteen strong choir of St Andrew’s and St George’s under its director, Brigitte Harris, included four soloists for a delightful lunch time concert playing three pieces, by Handel, Haydn and Mozart.

Over the years Anglicans have become used to a weekly diet of Choral Eucharist which bit by bit has replaced Choral Matins. So the 9.30am service at the Church of St John the Evangelist, the only church on Princes Street, brought back happy memories.

The Queen's Hall may seem like an unlikely venue to get hot and sweaty in, but on a very dreich and damp Thursday night towards the end of the Edinburgh Fringe, that's exactly what Shooglenifty man

Every morning throughout the Edinburgh International Festival there is a chamber concert at the Queen's Hall.

Felix Mendelssohn was born two hundred years ago and this we celebrated in the first half of the concert.

The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment make you listen again to Haydn.

Under Sir Roger Norrington they put an energy and pace into an all-Haydn evening at the Usher Hall on Saturday (22 August) that shook any dust off the audience's conception of the 18th century composer.

This is a real treat of song and dance from two dozen boys and girls aged between 8 and 12 from villages in South Africa, close to the border with Swaziland and Mozambique.

Choral Classics was the first of 19 late night classical music concerts to be held in August in a really historic building a few steps off the Royal Mile. Arrive a few minutes early and there's a cup of chocolate at the back of the candlelit church included with the ticket.

It feels good in here tonight, within this grand, wood-panelled chamber. The clock has just struck midnight; the audience are seated and exuding gentle bonhomie. Faint wisps of dry ice flutter from the stage, which is littered with an array of acoustic guitars as well as a set of bongos and hand drums.

The Indelicates are first on stage tonight and they turn a few heads with their Clash tinted, overtly London accented front-man and stationary, piano playing front-woman. The songs are petulant and self-consciously self-aware

The three young soloists made this a delightful evening of French sacred music at St Andrew's and St George's.

The St Andrew's boys are back from their UK jaunt with a string of Scottish shows. As well as enduring a disappointing appointment with Glasgow depressives My Latest Novel - who seem to have travelled into some sonic backwater since a couple of months ago - the audience were subjected to the worst sound quality, as the hundreds of conversations happening in The Queen's Hall swirled around like nails in a tin mouth.

Rock. And. Roll. That is what you get at a Monotonix gig, of the fiercest and most potently pure strain imaginable.