Unfortunately, Vladimir Kramnik is a principled person; as a protest against the Candidates tournament taking place he decided not to commentate. I approve of his decision even as I regret it - it's a serious loss for chess fans! On the other hand, we were given a boon for round 1, as Peter Svidler - who is seconding one of the players, Kirill Alekseenko - and none other than Magnus Carlsen joined in the commentary.
It was quite the lively round, too, and a surprising one. Two of the four games were decisive, a third game was close to having a winner, and the fourth game was very exciting even if neither player was too close to the abyss.
The draw was the marquee matchup between super-sub Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and the favorite, Fabiano Caruana. In the day's only non-English, MVL played the Ruy, Caruana used the neo-Archangelsk, one of his long-time favorite lines, and prepared an interesting new move. The game seems to have been very well played by both sides, and remained tense until fairly near the time control.
The secondary favorite, Ding Liren, had White against his countryman, Wang Hao. Wang Hao was semi-retired before qualifying for this event, and I seem to recall reading that he doesn't even have a second - at least not on site. Every reason could be offered why Ding would defeat him, but he didn't; in fact, he lost. Ding seems to have overvalued the knight vs. bishop imbalance he headed for with 30.f4. The position was static, but in this case that didn't mean that the knight would be the dominant piece. Despite a slip on move 39 (39...Rd4 should have been played) and White's missed chance on move 40 (40.d4!), Black played better and deservedly won; 41...Rg4 was the key move, and an attractive one.
Anish Giri also had White, and like Ding Liren is a player who rarely loses. Well...he lost. His conquerer was Ian Nepomniachtchi, who did a better job of navigating a razor-sharp line of the English. Giri started the trouble with the near-novelty 12.Rc1, but the players seemed to be in prep until Nepo's 19...b4; Giri expected Black to capture on c4 with the rook or the b-pawn instead. Giri lost the thread over the next few moves, and ultimately found himself in a rook vs. queen ending where there was no fortress to be found. It was a long win by Nepo, one which was well played and well earned.
Finally, Alexander Grischuk had an enormous space advantage against Kirill Alekseenko and seemed on his way to victory. He may have cashed out a bit too quickly, and although he was still better with his extra pawn Black's light-squared blockade and counterplay eventually saved the day.
I've annotated a couple of the games (one somewhat informally, based on analysis done with a friend), which you can replay (with the other two games) here. Here are the pairings for round 2: