Scheduling open-air concerts in mid-May in northern Europe is a triumph of hope over experience. I last spent time with Beyoncé – I’m sure she remembers it fondly and well – in 2016, in a football stadium in Sunderland on a damp, drizzly, early-summer English evening of the type that even strutting soul divas struggle to enliven. I don’t think it was merely the weather which left me underwhelmed by her brutalist attack, the sheer choreographed drill of the show, the lack of engagement, of spontaneity, of joy.

By then, Beyoncé was no longer seeking to be regarded as a mere pop star. She had recently taken on the unearthly qualities of an alien presence, entirely unrelatable, tilting for something far more culturally significant than a spot in the charts. She re-cast herself as cross-genre auteur, icon, uber-feminist, woman scorned and furious black rights’ campaigner. She did it with conviction. Plenty seemed persuaded.

Fast forward seven years and Beyoncé is both more totemic still and yet even less of a pop star than ever before. She doesn’t sell the most records, she has a dearth of tunes you can whistle on the bus, and she tours infrequently. Her most recent record, Renaissance, after which the tour is named, landed with the usual fawning fanfare but hasn’t really penetrated. It doesn’t seem to matter. She is simply Beyoncé, and that appears to be enough.

In Edinburgh, the weather was much the same as in Sunderland. Mild, damp, grizzly-grey. But something had changed. The mood felt more attuned to the Renaissance theme of celebratory transgression, its smorgasbord of black musical history powered by liberation, self-love and escape. There were nods to Rose Royce, Sade, Diana Ross, Kendrick Lamar, the Jackson 5, Megan Thee Stallion and Donna Summer. The mood palette was Christmas with Liberace: silver, tinsel, sparkle-a-go-go. Designer chintz.

The sheer scale of the production made for a dazzling spectacle. Beyoncé skidded around on a moon buggy. Lasers fired across the stage. As a finale, she soared high above the audience on a horse (not, alas, a real one). The HD video screens were vast, bigger than any I’d ever seen, making Beyoncé seem even more larger than life, defying us to believe that the person in front of us could be real.

The music? The music in a stadium show is always liable to sound muddy, imprecise and lacking in nuance. Mixing a live band with electronic beats, the bottom end went deep and low; hardly subtle, but effective for the rhythm-based attack of the Renaissance material. The set was broken into themed sections – political songs, with a hip-hop bent; sultry boudoir songs, with a bed – each one featuring a fresh set and costume change and titled like an over-priced celebrity fragrance: ‘Opulence’, ‘Anointed’… you get the picture.

The songs? Beyoncé isn’t really about the songs, a fact she seemed tacitly to acknowledge by omitting some of her more memorable ones. There was no ‘Single Ladies’, ‘Halo’, ‘Diva’, ‘Survivor’ or ‘Drunk in Love’. Instead, she performed pretty much all of Renaissance and a smattering of tracks from her past work. She frequently indulged in the frustrating trait of performing a verse of one track before veering off into something else.

With a few exceptions, the songs weren’t going to cut it. The singer, however, was a different matter. You can argue about the depth and profundity of Beyoncé’s cultural significance till the cows come home, but there is ultimately no denying the power of her physical presence and her voice. For all the spectacle, this turned out to be a singer’s show.

She began, having risen to view through the stage floor, with a bunch of ballads, starting with Destiny Child’s ‘Dangerously in Love’ and moving through the big emotive gears on ‘1+1’. Check the pipes, she seemed to be saying. Though Renaissance is her club record, she spent most of the night on the fringes of the dancefloor, watching the fun rather than participating. She shimmied infrequently, becoming the still centre as the million-dollar mayhem unfolded around her. The exception, and it was a notable one, was when she led her diverse troupe of dancers through their paces on ‘Break My Soul’, where the three-pronged B-stage came into effective play. There was even a glimpse of human frailty during the frantic ‘Heated’ when she stumbled on a lyric. She giggled; everyone else on stage looked a little nervous.

I’d be tempted to go and see Beyoncé again in another seven years. Perhaps the sun might shine next time. Even better, by then she might be ready to come in from the cold and let her music, rather than the hoists, HD screens and horses, do more of the heavy lifting.