Blockbusters both; but actually, it's what's on in the hall on the nights in between that's more significant.

There was some widely held, if discreetly expressed, concern in the first few years of Jonathan Mills's tenure as festival director: that the Usher Hall programme, for many the heart of the Edinburgh International Festival, risked being sidelined. Everyone could understand Mills's urgency to address perceived gaps in programming, which basically he did by beginning with the early Baroque period and working backwards into medieval and even earlier times, digging right into the soil from which the earliest roots, shoots and influences upon western classical music emerged, from many continents. And of course the fascinating concert programmes that resulted, mostly staged in Greyfriars Kirk, became something of a cache, and big sellers in their own right.