Musical theatre needn’t be dominated by the human voice. Instrumental dramas with an element of acting can be a good way into the wonderful world of chamber music for younger audiences, and the Wigmore Hall’s new gambit of special student tickets for contemporary music paid off with the very different crowd there last night. It was rewarded with playing of the highest imaginative order from soloists in their own right: violinists Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Pekka Kuusisto, viola-player Lilli Maijala and cellist Pieter Wispelway.

“Ah now, I can’t promise you sun,” says a Scots lady-in-waiting of her native weather to a novice Englishwoman near the start of Rona Munro’s masterly James Plays. It’s the first of many references to make the audience laugh knowingly. Well, after four days of the worst weather Edinburgh Festivalgoers can remember, the sun came out yesterday morning. There’s no better place to be than the airy Queen’s Hall if you want an 11am recital of light and shade – and to say that of yesterday’s duo programme is an understatement.

If you want an image that defines, for this writer at least, the essence of the Edinburgh Festival, it is the sight of Greyfriars Kirk full to capacity at 5.30 pm on a blustery Monday afternoon. At other times of year this sort of event might be hopefully billed as a “rush hour concert”, sparsely attended by commuters en route to the suburbs, but at festival time Edinburgh has a whole new demographic.

Schubert played and sung through a long summer day by the water: what could be more enchanting? The prospect did not take into account the pain in that all too short-lived genius’s late work: when interpreted by a world-class trio, quartet and pianists at the 10th East Neuk Festival, it could be exhausting. So the hours in between were much needed balm on an afternoon and evening in the picture-postcard fishing village of Crail in the East Neuk (cf "nook") of Fife below St Andrews.

Well, I’ll be damned if subscriptions don’t shoot up this summer. This lovingly made paean to the New York Review of Books, directed by Martin Scorsese and his long-time documentary collaborator David Tedeschi, was better than any advert, though I’d hesitate – but only briefly – to say that it was one long advert. 95 minutes probably makes it an advertorial feature, like those misleading pages you see in magazines and increasingly newspapers.

Under what circumstances can Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet, the most (over)played of the 15, sound both as harrowing as it possibly can be and absolutely fresh? Well, the context helps: hearing it at the breaking heart of the fourth concert in the Jerusalem Quartet’s Shostakovich cycle gave it extra resonance with the works on either side of it. But above all this is a team that plays with a degree of nuance, weight, beauty and commitment that I’ve never heard even the composer’s preferred foursome, the Borodin Quartet, surpass either live or in their numerous recordings.

For those of us who’d held fast to the generalisation that Michael Tippett went awry after 1962, it seemed emblematic that pianist Steven Osborne and the Heath Quartet were never to meet in a concert of two halves. After all, didn’t Tippett’s music split and splinter into a thousand, often iridescent atoms after his second opera, King Priam? Its satellite piece, the Second Piano Sonata, seems to sit restlessly, and quite deliberately, on the fault line.

Take a cushion or two among the beautiful young people gathered around the players – no Proms Arena crowd, this - pull up a chair or find your standing place; sit bolt upright, lie back, stretch your legs, tweet during the music if you like (an invitation thankfully declined). CLoSer’s latest concert in the friendly Village Underground is a rather far cry from the 1941 premiere of Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps given before 400 of his fellow prisoners and guards, outside in the rain, in Stalag VIII-A, Görlitz (now Zgorzelec in Poland). Not in one crucial respect, though.

Miklós Perényi makes the listener re-think how a cello should sound. Forget the huge tone of the Russians - think Rostropovich or Natalia Gutman, or the attention-grabbing of Americans or even the flamboyance of the French. No floppy hair, no vanity or mannerisms here. Perényi plays with simplicity and accuracy, but with phenomenal craft and musicality. He dosn't force the tone, yet knows exactly how to project right to the back row of the hall. Technique, which is there in abundance, always seems to serve musical ends.

Nature declined to reveal the Northern Lights over a long winter weekend in Iceland. My hotel was geared up to the spectacle, offering the option of a phone call any time in the night should they appear; but no call came. I only hope the tourists who packed the outward-bound plane hadn’t booked just for that. They’d surely not be disappointed in this most spectacular of lands so long as the weekend package-tour selling point wasn’t an idée fixe, and in any case I suspect half had come to club the night away.