For the most part, art fairs tend to take place in glorified aircraft hangers or marquees apparently left over from the last society wedding. Not so, by any manner of means, with the new Salzburg World Fine Art Fair, this year in its second annual edition. Of course, the general associations of the very name Salzburg would seem to preclude any such descent from sublimity, and sure enough, this art fair takes place not on some showground on the fringes, but in no less than the glamorous purlieus of the Residenz.

This is no doubt largely because of the fair’s alliance with the Salzburg Festival of music and theatre. The relation of the two is a little vaguely defined, but they run simultaneously and are described as parallel activities. The fair is supported by, among others, the Friends of the Salzburg Festival, who see the art and antiques on show as a valuable supplement for their core audience of music-lovers, while no doubt the fair’s organisers are aware of the prestige of association with the festival, as well as of having a captive audience of cultured, moneyed people.

The Salzburg Art Fair is as much about antiques as it is about art. Fittingly for the locale, there is a lot of fine 18th-century furniture, looking perfectly at home in the august setting of the Residenz’s Carabinieri Saal, which boasts a painted ceiling by Martino Altomonti dating from 1710, and elaborate Baroque frescoes by Johann Michael Rottmayr. It is an enormous hall, used these days primarily for concert performances and famed in the past as the venue for the first performance of Mozart’s first opera, La Finta Semplice. The classic furniture and Old Master paintings look equally at home in the neighbouring Audienzsaal, known as the location for Mozart’s appearance there in 1762 as a six-year-old virtuoso.

The festival proper takes as its motto this year “For love is as strong as death”, and opened on July 26 with a new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which is joined in the programme by a revival of its much-praised 2006 production of The Magic Flute, not to mention such more obviously love-and-death related works as Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet, Dvorák’s Rusalka and Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle.

Novelty is served by the premiere of Irmingarde, or the Power of Fate, a weird-sounding musical project by Mnozil Brass and Berndt Jeschek, already noted for their enormous success in 2005 with the operetta The Trojan Boat.

The concert side concentrates on Schubert and the Sicilian composer Salvatore Sciarrino, who won the new Musikpreis Salzburg in 2006. Drama includes a new adaptation of Crime and Punishment, specially commissioned from Dimitre Dinev, alongside that old Salzburg stand-by Everyman.

Evidently, though the festival’s image is heavily dependent on a prestigious past, it believes in keeping at least one foot in the present, if not the future. The same can be said of the art fair. Though the more than 30 leading European dealers offer many wonders from the past, the selection of things on view comes up at least to the early 20th century.

Obedient to the new ascendancy of Art Deco and the place claimed by photography in recent international art fairs, both make a number of bold appearances here, sometimes combined in a single piece, as in the case of the Austrian photographer Rudolf Koppitz (1883-1936), whose astonishing Symbolist Movement Study easily dominates its surroundings.

The Salzburg World Art Fair is at the Residenz, Salzburg, August 8-17, daily 11am-7pm, Thursday, Aug 14 to 9pm. www.salzburg-faf.com