WHATEVER else can be said about the 70th edition of the Edinburgh International Festival this August – and there will be much in The Herald before the final firework fizzes out on Monday August 28 – director Fergus Linehan's programme offers a survey of opera that few of its predecessors could boast, even in the earliest days when founding partner Glyndebourne was in residence in the Scottish capital.

The combination of staged and concert performances ranges from a revival of Mark-Anthony Turnage's Berkoff adaptation, Greek, which was premiered at the Festival in 1988, back through Britten, Wagner, Puccini, Verdi and Mozart to a celebration of the 450th anniversary of the birth of Claudio Monteverdi, the composer who can be said to have invented the form. The presentation of the three extant Monteverdi operas, perhaps a third of his actual output, is in the hands of Sir John Eliot Gardiner, whose association with him goes back half a century to his founding of the Monteverdi Choir, which he continues to direct to this day. Although the concentrated experience of hearing the dramatic musical stories of Orfeo, Ulysses and Poppea over four days is available in Edinburgh in August, Gardiner, the choir and the English Baroque soloists began their Monteverdi 450 season this past week at the Colston Hall in Bristol – run by former Glasgow Royal Concert Hall director Louise Mitchell – and will perform all three there before the end of May. The package will also tour across Europe and, in October, cross the Atlantic.

At one time this would have seemed a highly esoteric and specialist project likely to attract only a niche audience, but the Festival director before Linehan, Jonathan Mills, was one of those who appreciated the growing audience for early music and made it an integral part of his programmes, hosting visits by international ensembles with very specific expertise. Even more crucial to the move of early opera out of the realms of academia and into the mainstream has been the performance of Monteverdi, Purcell and Handel by young people. Whatever the reasons for this – the works are smaller in scale than later "grand" opera; the purity of tone of young voices is particularly suited to early music – there have been some fine examples in recent years. The growth of the music programme at the University of St Andrews, which has included a new staging of an opera each year, began in 2009 with Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (coupled with the Monteverdi miniature Il ballo dell'ingrate), in which Ben McAteer sang Aeneas. At the end of 2013, the director of the Dunedin Consort, Professor John Butt, took charge of an inventive student performance of Handel's Acis and Galatea in Glasgow's Mono Cafe Bar. The following year a young cast from the Ryedale Festival in North Yorkshire brought a production of Monteverdi's The Coronation Of Poppea from Ampleforth Abbey to Musselburgh's Brunton Theatre and Perth Concert Hall.

Last weekend Scottish Opera's youth company, Connect, got in on the act for the first time. Instead of presenting a new work written especially for them, as has been the norm in the past, Connect gave three performances of a new staging of Dido and Aeneas by the artistic director of Scottish Youth Theatre Mary McCluskey at the Beacon in Greenock. With three professional principals, the production had young players in the pit band, conducted by Chris Gary, singers of the same 16-21 age group in the smaller roles and making up the chorus, and some stage management youngsters as well.The result was superb, with the singing and acting – in what was clever and colourful version – particularly outstanding.

John Eliot Gardiner's admiration for the young singers of the National Youth Choir of Scotland led to him inviting them to his own festival in France after conducting them in Edinburgh, so he is certainly familiar with the tastes and abilities of young musicians. Speaking about Monteverdi 450 on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Wednesday morning, however, he enthused about the directness and narrative pace of the composer's work as appealing to anyone unfamiliar with opera, young or old. "The artificiality of later opera can be off-putting," he said, adding that the pure voices required for early opera was preferable to many people to that "awful Wagnerian wobble."

Connect's Dido was certainly the sort of show which, at a little over an hour, could make new converts to the genre our national opera company is there to promote. As the youth company celebrates its tenth birthday next year, it would be good to see their work enjoying more than just three outings on one stage.