The days of themed Edinburgh Festivals seemed to have gone, missed or unmourned depending on your point of view. Fortunately, the relationship between art and conflict offers so many different and oblique perspectives that there was never much danger that the programme would lapse into any of the familiar poetry-and-pity, lions-and-donkeys, guns-of-August clichés. Encouragingly, the opening concert (8 August), which in recent years has only rarely had a chance to set a tone and trajectory for what follows, was carefully curated and beautifully performed, without excess emotion or anti-war finger-pointing. Oliver Knussen conducted the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in three pre-war works from Austria, Russia and France, countries that were at the centre of the domino collapse of