Cultural stereotypes didn't spoil the journey as Sarah Urwin Jones let the festival's operatic offerings carry her from the Wild West to Latin America

Alongside opportunities for vast wealth acquisition, world travel and a few "Dear Mum, defeated Aztecs today. Wish you were here" postcards, the soldiers of the Spanish conquest naturally formed the vanguard of a cultural curiosity and artistic exploration of the New World, often effected from the safety of the Old, that would last for centuries.

But cultural stereotypes abounded last week at the International Festival, even if, like Puccini, one had visited the "exotic" country in question. Puccini's opera La Fanciulla del West (1907), the rootin', tootin' tale of lonesome goldrush miners and their Minnie, the archetypal woman who stands by her dastardly bandit of a man, is based on Belasco's melodrama, The Girl Of The Golden West. Filled with rich orchestration, although none of the blockbuster arias of a Madama Butterfly or Tosca, it opens with a musical evocation of the Western plains that is now its received soundtrack. There are miss-hits too, not least Puccini's predilection for a pentatonic scale that at times makes his California sound more like China.

But a vibrant Orchestra of Scottish Opera did wonderful work with the score in this concert performance in the Usher Hall, although conductor Francesco Corti, rather curiously, had them galloping with such sheer force that the entire supporting cast of miners couldn't be heard.

No such problem for Susan Bullock's formidable, strong Minnie, triumphantly hurling her cards into the audience, or Carl Tanner, who made a decent Dick Johnson, Minnie's bandit-in-disguise lover. But bad Jack Rance, the disgruntled sheriff who wanted Minnie to himself, was rather equivocally served by a gruff Juha Uusitalo, and the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, who did some very nice work as the dusty mining hordes, occasionally sounded more like a bunch of blokes half-heartedly cheering on a football match.

Puccini might have been to America, but 225 years earlier, Purcell certainly hadn't been to Mexico, the setting for his "semi-opera", The Indian Queen. Arguably it didn't matter, for neither had Dryden, who co-wrote the play (or most of the audience), which probably accounts for the fashionably preposterous, over-complex plot which Purcell's music, unfinished at his death, only incidentally illustrated.

As Mexican Queen Zempoalla defends her realm against some war-mongering Peruvians, led by Montezuma, the intricacies don't matter as such, as Purcell's music comes in at such unpredictable moments that concert performances make very little dramatic sense.

Musically it's another story – The Sixteen are excellent, their period instrument orchestra ticking along smoothly under Harry Christophers, the chorus superb. Bass Roderick Williams is excellent, injecting colour and humour, as is tenor Allan Clayton. After Purcell's death, his somewhat less talented brother Daniel wrote a masque to 'finish off' the semi-opera, a diverting but somewhat dubious epilogue, featuring a bickering husband and wife – two excellent members of The Sixteen – and a suggestive Roderick Williams making the most of rather workaday musical material.

In Greyfriars Church, we got the real Latin American thing, once more, as part of the ongoing series investigating the fulsome cross-cultural repertoire that resulted from a colonising Spanish empire attempting to subdue and evangelize the "natives" through music. And it worked, as this concert of culture-clash baroque music showed, the indigenous Indians and the descendants of the original foreign settlers adopting Catholic musical formats and creating a distinctive repertoire influenced by local popular song, much explored in recent years.

Jordi Savall and two of his crack troops of period instrument and vocal specialists, Hesperion XXI and La Capella Reial de Catalunya, ran slickly through the repertoire – if improvising rather predictably. What marks Savall out is his absolutely meticulous attention to historical performance, making, where necessary, his imaginative leaps to sounds of 300 years ago.

In the Queen's Hall it was a week for baritones, with two heavyweights, Simon Keenlyside and Gerald Finley, in two very different recitals of American and European song. Keenlyside's expert vocal storytelling spun a web through a beautiful but thematically rather bleak morning of loss, grief and alcoholism, courtesy of Ned Rorem and Walt Whitman, George Butterworth's settings of AE Housman's A Shropshire Lad and Schumann's Dichterliebe.

Keenlyside's polished, lyrical, sculptural voice is supported by a wonderful clarity of diction, segueing from the intimate familiarity and slight nostalgia of the storyteller in Butterworth's The Lads In Their Hundreds, to the internal agonies of Dichterliebe. But despite the brilliance of his vocal painting, Keenlyside never appeared entirely physically comfortable on the recital stage, unlike Canadian baritone Gerald Finley.

Finley, who has an almost infinitely rich bass range, has a huge voice that he perfectly attenuates to the Queen's Hall acoustic. His programme ranged from the delicate sensibilities of the lovers of Schumann's Heine settings, to a brilliantly drawling eulogy of Charles Ives' Texan cowhand in the wonderfully idiosyncratic Charlie Rutlage, via a bit of guinea fowl baiting in Ravel's comic Histoires Naturelles.

Finley is a master storyteller, intelligent, nuanced, easy in both the serious and more comic repertoire. He sang Samuel Barber's Solitary Hotel – a setting of text from Ulysses – with all the drama of the nosey fireside onlooker, then captured the dissonance of desperation in the same composer's Bessy Bobtail. His fiendish Ravel showed inch-perfect grasp of French inflections, and pianist Julius Drake was excellent too, his piano chirruping nervously in The Cricket, gliding effortlessly through The Swan.

The pair encored with the wildly melodramatic The Desert, by the deservedly obscure Louis Emmanuel, which involved a bravura exposition of Emmanuel's overblown entree by Drake whilst Finley sweltered, hammily, under the cruel sun, nervously dodging a wheeling vulture. It put a smile on my face for the rest of the week.

La Fanciulla del West, Usher Hall; The Indian Queen, Usher Hall, Music of Fire and Air, Greyfriars Church; Simon Keenlyside, The Queen's Hall, Gerald Finley, The Queen's Hall