Opera: Admeto, Festival Theatre Keith Bruce Star rating: ****

Of all the outings Handel's operas have in this, his anniversary, year, this brilliant German staging of his 1727 London hit will surely be one of the best. Polymath director Doris Dorrie has set the complex classical narrative, which the composer tailored to meet the demands of the singers of his day, in the samurai culture of Japan. This not only gives the opportunity for some beautiful, wonderfully costumed and lit stage pictures, and butoh-inspired choreography by Tadashi Endo, it works by applying an alien, half-understood, culture of honour and sacrifice to the story for modern westerners.

That's only half of it, however. This production has a fine sense of humour, from the comedy fat-suit worn by the sumo Hercules (William Berger) to the animal incarnations of the dancers from Endo's Mamu Dance Theatre as sheep and rutting stags and the prop bonsai that has to stand for the whole royal gardens.

Conceptually clever, the show has a great pit band in the Festspiel Orchester Gottingen, directed by Nicholas McGegan from the harpischord, and some fine performances from the cast. Of the three counter-tenors onstage, Tim Mead, in the title role, stood head and shoulders above, and David Bates's Trasimede was somewhat less than pitch perfect. But Marie Arnet's Alceste and Kirsten Blaise's superbly acted predatory, coquettish Antigona are top class and the second act, in particular, where glorious aria follows glorious aria, is packed full of beautiful music.

The opening night was not without its technical difficulties, but this is a superb production which combines emotional impact with moments of glorious silliness, not so much ingenious as inspired. Final performance tonight.

Theatre: The Yalta Game, King's Theatre, Edinburgh Neil Cooper Star rating: ****

Holiday romances might never last, but there's something about playing away that makes the imagination run away with itself. So it goes in Brian Friel's flighty take on Chekhov's short story, Lady With Lapdog, presented here as part of The Gate Theatre, Dublin's Gate Friel trio of plays for Edinburgh International Festival. Gurov is a handsome young cad who spends his days chatting up ingenues like Anna. But when the season ends, the memories of this aspirational fantasist are seen through rose-tinted glasses tainted by the bittersweet sunset of regret.

There's a glorious lightness to Patrick Mason's production, played on a bright stage full of cafe chairs around which Gurov and Anna dance out what may be a make-believe courtship. In tone, it resembles an extended sitcom, with Risteard Cooper's ennui-laden Gurov resembling Michael Caine's Alfie. Rebecca O'Mara as his object of desire, Anna, cuts a wide-eyed dash as a woman who's not as dumb as she seems.

The perceptions each has of the situation they've conjured up and exaggerated beyond fiction beggar belief. This makes for a wise and witty waltz around the relationship between truth and artifice in the most elegantly realised of speed-dates. Friel gets to the heart of the matter in just 50 lovelorn minutes of unrequited passion. It may have started with a kiss, but by the end it's like it never happened.

Music: Michael Volle/Franz Hawlata, Queens Hall Michael Tumelty Star rating: ***

THERE was something unpromising about the musical fare on offer on Saturday morning at the Queens Hall. It was probably the prospect of two hours of baritone and bass sonorities from singers Michael Volle and Franz Hawlata. Any anticipatory doubt could be attributed to the less than overwhelming performance by Hawlata on the previous evening.

Doubts intensified as the two singers launched their unusual duet programme with a set of fine Mendelssohn songs where the balance was wrong, with the strong, heroic baritone of Volle powering over Hawlata's woolly sound.

But the picture changed as the singers got into their stride for Loewe's quirky songs, packed with action, before plunging deep into the Romantic heartland with Schumann's duets, a beautiful quintet of songs where the balance between the two voices mellowed and Helmut Deutsch's accompaniments came into their own.

Then the gloves came off as Volle, who has a powerful aura and the most winning smile in the business, gave a riotous set of performances of songs by Hugo Wolf, capped by an inebriated version of Zur Warnung, where Helmut Deutsch's acrobatic pianistic simulation of the "critic" tumbling down the stairs following a boot up the derriere provoked hilarity. Britten's youthful two-part songs rounded off an effective recital.

Music: Ivo Pogorelich, Usher Hall Michael Tumelty Star rating: ***

GENIUS or wacko? The maverick Croatian pianist Ivo Pogorelich is both. On Saturday, 15 minutes before the show, the doors of the auditorium were opened. The lights were out. There, in the centre of the black stage, legs stretched out, wearing his off-duty gear, rhapsodising over a series of soft chords, and oblivious to the crowd filtering into the hall, was Pogorelich, lost in self-communion. After five minutes, he stood up and wandered off to get dressed.

What followed was astonishing. He opened with a Chopin Nocturne, followed that with the composer's Third Sonata, Liszt's Mephisto Waltz no 1, Sibelius's Valse Triste and Ravel's magisterial Gaspard de la Nuit.

Pogorelich has a technique like no other. He's heavy on the bass but he does delicacy, clarity and colour like no-one else. I have never heard such shades as those that coloured his Ravel playing. I have never heard the futuristic, spiky dissonances of the Liszt so pungent. I have not heard the sighs of the Valse Triste so effectively realised on a keyboard.

But he is flawed. Structurally, his performances were shambolic. They lacked shape, logic, flow and continuity. He stopped at every corner, lavishing infinite care on every nuance at the expense of the big picture. He dissected and deconstructed the music. What we got were the bits.

Music: Romeo et Juliette, Usher Hall Michael Tumelty Star rating: ****

ALL reactions to music are personal. All my adult life I have nursed a feeling that, despite all the scholarship, despite the performances, multiple recordings and consistent advocacy by generations of musicians, thinkers and conductors, the genius and literally incomparable originality of Hector Berlioz remain undervalued.

Berlioz, light years ahead of his time, is one of the greatest musical inventors, blossomed again in reaction to an astounding festival performance of his Romeo et Juliette by the RSNO and its music director, Stephane Deneve.

His performance trounced all easy categorisations: this is a genre-busting piece. It's a standalone; a one-off in a catalogue of one-offs by this left-field character. All of its unique facets were highlighted and underlined by Deneve's forensic approach: the originality of its melodic, harmonic, textural and structural invention; its innovative approach to instrumentation and orchestration; and its miraculous clarity and precision-tooled control of mood and atmosphere.

Imprecisions apart, the RSNO played out of their skins, the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, in full and in part, offstage and on, sang with muscle and sonority, Patricia Bardon sang lusciously, though bass Franz Hawlata wandered a bit. No matter. This was a real festival occasion and a benchmark performance by the RSNO/Deneve team, with the big Frenchman in his element for his debut interpretation of the work. It amounted to an important statement about this very great, crazy composer.

Supported by David McLellan.

Dance: Michael Clark Company: New Work, Playhouse, Edinburgh Mary Brennan Star rating: ****

When Michael Clark last showed a dancework in the Edinburgh Festival programme in 1988, he was still badged as the enfant terrible of British choreography. Audiences came, expecting to see classical ballet roughed up and given a dose of shock treatment. Clark didn't disappoint. The real shock then, as now, was the purity, the acid-etched sharpness of the body lines and the instinct for musical energies that were distinctive signatures of Clark's style. It's those qualities that stand proud in this double-bill. What arrives on stage is a fiercely beautiful, focused and commanding movement vocabulary.

Bodies arch backwards with a creamy ease. Balances are held in a freeze-frame of elegant geometry. And when a turn of speed is called for, the little skips, spins and prancings have an insouciant airiness. The new piece - come, been and gone - filters that promise through Clark's own life experiences. With music by Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and David Bowie, this is Clark singing the body electric - finding the sounds of his youth so compelling still, he even joins in the dance. The homage to Bowie, in Heroes, is unexpectedly moving. What's terrible now? That he's been away for so long.

From Saturday's later editions.

Music Ricercar Consort, Bach at Greyfriars Conrad Wilson Star rating: *****

Bach, it used to be said, was never young, and the three death-conscious cantatas that formed the Ricercar Consort's second contribution to Bach at Greyfriars perhaps showed why. Yet the great Actus Tragicus which formed the programme's climax was composed at the age of 22.

Two warbling recorders and two warm-toned gambas set the atmosphere. Four singers joined in. Halfway through the work, the soprano Katharine Fuge poignantly pleaded: "Yes, come Lord Jesus" some 15 times, and the music trailed into silence. Then, mostly in the major, the keys began to rise again. Death, it was implied, had been conquered. Yet the work remains a rarity. We heard it last night in pristine form, the instrumental tones underpinning the voices with complete expressiveness, the deliberate little pauses and falterings all part of the effect.

Philippe Pierlot on this evidence is the best of Bachians, but the fleet, intense violinist Francois Fernandez, the cellist Rainer Zipperling, the sweet-toned recorder players Kees Boeke and Gaelle Lecoq were all part of the picture, as were Fuge's fine fellow singers Carlos Mena, Julian Podger and Stephan MacLeod. Focusing on the music and nothing but the music was what counted, and these performers reached the heart of the matter.

Supported by Dunard Fund.

From Saturday's later editions.