Talents new to the Edinburgh International Festival and those making welcome returns are celebrated in this week's selection of Bank of Scotland Herald Angel award winners.

Soprano Christiane Karg stepped in to replace Rebecca Evans for a Queen's Hall recital in the company of the excellent Edinburgh-born pianist Malcolm Martineau on Tuesday, and charmed her new audience with a beautiful sequence of songs by Strauss, Faure, Debussy, Poulenc, Brahms and Berg. The demanded encore produced an equally well-considered postscript, from the pen of Robert Schumann.

The ballet company of choreographer Angelin Preljocaj was also making its first visit to the Festival, and brought a great deal of work. The apocalyptic work And then, one thousand years of peace is an epic undertaking that starts with some startling contemporary dance and embraces an Olympiad of national flags on the way to a final tableau of two dancers and two live lambs. A double bill set to the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen followed, offering another side of the work of French company who would be welcomed back in an instant.

Romanian theatre director Silviu Purcarete has been a regular visitor to Scotland, to Glasgow as well as Edinburgh and most recently to the EIF with a production of Faust at Ingliston. His return this year was with an adaptation of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels in collaboration with Irish composer Shaun Davey, which was as instructive about the author as the book, hilariously funny, and featured a real horse.

Irish singer Camille O'Sullivan has been a regular visitor to Edinburgh both with her own Fringe shows and as part of acclaimed late-night cabaret performances. This year she is part of the EIF Programme under the auspices of the Royal Shakespeare Company with a staged version of the Bard's poem The Rape of Lucrece, written by herself and Feargal Murray and directed by Elizabeth Freestone. In his review Neil Cooper described it as "a gorgeous piece of work" sure to feed into her repertoire for decades.

On the Fringe, at the Acoustic Music Centre at St Bride's, fiddler Duncan Chisholm played a live accompaniment to film that documents a vanishing rural way of life, capturing interviews with other musicians who are the living embodiments of ancient traditions. Although this multi-media show has been seen elsewhere on its road here, this was our first opportunity to recognise its significance, and excellence.

Composer Tom Cunningham and writer Alexander McCall Smith followed up their acclaimed Okavango Macbeth with the world premiere of a site-specific work closer to home. A Tapestry Of Many Threads tells the story of the Dovecot Studios, its historic collection of tapestries, and of the former Infirmary Street Baths building that is now its home. It does so in a sequence of 19 songs which were brilliantly performed by mezzo-soprano Beth Mackay and baritone Andrew McTaggart in a staging by Mark Hathaway. It had just 10 performances on the Fringe but hopes are high for more of this home-grown triumph.

This week's Little Devil award goes to the resilient performers of Usta Usta Republika, whose show Cadillac, involving a large American car and featuring a full band, was scheduled for the Courtyard at Summerhall. However, the authorities decided that amplified music in the venue's outdoor areas was not permitted so they began looking for an alternative site.

The necessity of accommodating a large heavy American car proved an obstacle. Eventually someone had the bright idea of leaving the car where it was and moving Usta Usta Republika the band indoors to the bar – and opening the window. This inspired piece of lateral thinking appeased the authorities, has attracted no complaints from the neighbours, and ensured that the show could go on.

That company's Polish compatriots Song of the Goat Theatre are the winners of this week's Bank of Scotland Herald Archangel award for their sustained contribution to the theatrical riches of Edinburgh in August. Also at Summerhall with Songs of Lear, which takes fragments of Shakespeare's text and combines it with music and gesture to explore layers of meaning of the text, and just a few performances of Macbeth, which applied the same technique to the Scottish Play, it was a welcome return for the company.

Founders director Grzegorz Bral, performer Anna Zubrzycki and their colleagues were stalwarts of the highly regarded Aurora Nova programmes at St Stephens Church in Stockbridge, bringing Chronicles: A Lamentation in 2004 and returning with Lacrimosa in 2007. Their unique style was acclaimed then and their return has been equally praised.

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