THERE'S an old fashioned view, to which I subscribe, that festivals should go out in a blaze of glory.

And that, precisely, is how this year's Edinburgh International Festival climaxed on Saturday night, with an incandescent performance of William Walton's Belshazzar's Feast, with playing by the RSNO and all its offstage augmentations, conducted by David Robertson with all the acuity required to unleash this fantastic explosion of sound and colour from the page; and with the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, at the peak of its form, lashing the piece into place with singing of such power and purity that it pinned you to your seat.

There's an interesting proposition about this piece: no matter how many times you have heard it; no matter how familiar with it you might be; a good performance of it will be exciting. A great performance, however, will still be shocking. And that sense of shock permeated Saturday night's performance by the RSNO, the Edinburgh Festival Chorus and baritone Neal Davies, whose role was somewhat eclipsed by all the glittering orchestral brilliance and power around him; and it was a massively powerful performance, devastating in its impact, and leaving you feeling that you had never heard the work quite like that before.

The problem with Belshazzar, always, is what to programme with it. And the RSNO came up with a brilliant solution by prefacing the mighty monster with two short pieces, run as a continuum: Charles Ives's lean, spare and quizzical opus, The Unanswered Question, followed immediately by Morton Feldman's hypnotic, gently pulsing Coptic Light, which, together, perfectly set the scene for the eruption of colour, choral magnificence and orchestral splendour after the interval.

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