Arctic music, not a monkey in sight

The Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival is a feast of classical music within a few hundred kilometres of the Arctic Circle, writes Michael Dervan.

If you think an opera festival in Wexford or a music festival in Bantry is unusual or unlikely, try getting your head around the idea of a chamber music festival in Kuhmo, Finland. Kuhmo is a crossroads town in the middle of nowhere. It's set in a landscape of lakes and forests, a 600km, seven-hour-plus drive from the capital and major population centre, Helsinki. To put it in an Irish perspective, that's further away than Aberdeen is from Dublin. The Arctic Circle is 350km to the north, the Russian border 40km to the east - Kuhmo was much bombed by the Russians in what the Finns call the Winter War.

The population of 10,500 is concentrated in the urban centre on the shore of Lake Lammasjärvi. But the area covered by the municipality is 5,500 square kilometres, roughly the size of Co Mayo, but with a 10th of the population. That averages out at just over two inhabitants per square kilometre. As I drove the 200km from Joensuu airport with the vice-chairman of the festival patron's association, we must have been playing havoc with the population density as we were passing through the countryside.

Summer attractions include hunting and fishing, night-time bear watching, berry picking, smoke saunas, as well as the visual and physical delights of lakes amid endless, gently undulating forest scenery. And for 14 days every July there's also the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival, which proudly boasts that it is an even greater boon to local trade than Christmas.

Kuhmo is a long-established event - it was founded in 1970 by Seppo Kimanen, then a 21-year-old cellist - and it is big. Over a crowded weekend I sampled just 15 of the 72 concerts of its main programme, which this year involves 145 artists and covers a repertoire of more than 250 pieces. Incredible as it may seem, they've actually reduced the musicians' work-rate at Kuhmo over the years. In the past the programme was even bigger, and there were concerts with almost impromptu programming, pieces chosen at the last minute and presented with all the potential benefits and drawbacks of on-the-day, minimum rehearsal.

Musically, Kuhmo is a place for hungry omnivores. This year's theme was Journeys, which, over three days, took me to a succession of locations.

Hollywood was served by Howard Hawks's 1928 film A Girl in Every Port, a Louise Brooks vehicle, seen in a gremlin-infected screening with a live performance of a 1993 score by Marc Marder.

The Vatican was presented from the perspective of the young Mozart, transcribing Allegri's Miserere(then the Vatican's sole property) after a single hearing. Sweden's excellent Eric Ericson Chamber Choir performed it with attractive, sharp outlines. Room was found also for Mozart's exact contemporary, the English composer Thomas Linley, with Chloë Hanslip making a brave stab at his impossible-sounding Sonata in A for violin and piano, the balance of this work (unlike Mozart's keyboard and violin sonatas) overwhelmingly loaded in favour of the violin.

Hungarian flavour came from some great non-Hungarian names (Haydn, Brahms, Schubert), as well as some unlikely ones, a musically thin set of variations for violin by the precocious, short-lived Basque composer Arriaga, and part of a Suite Hongroiseby Venezuelan Reynaldo Hahn, sometime lover of Marcel Proust. Actual Hungarians were represented by Franz Lehár (a serenade arranged by Fritz Kreisler), as well as from that master of the miniature, György Kurtág (some of his Signs, Games and Messagesfor solo viola), and György Ligeti.

Ligeti's Fluxus-inspired Poéme symphoniquefor 100 metronomes featured as the music for a new dance work, a kind of life to death pantomime by Tiina Lindfors. But the metronomes were treated as a kind of handy aural wallpaper. Neither the letter nor the spirit of the original musical enterprise was observed. The same kind of bowdlerisation was meted out to Terry Riley's In C, chopped into a handful of excerpts to provide links in a reading of Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince, offered as a Sunday morning event for children.

The omnivores at Kuhmo need a strong constitution and a lot of stamina if they plan on taking everything in. The schedule is so busy, the days so full, it's easy to overlook the fact that some single events are actually on the lines of marathon. I got a flavour of Kuhmo in nothing succeeds like excess mode on my first day, through a Keyboard Fever programme that ran from 9pm to just after 1am, and included pieces for piano (with up to eight hands on a single keyboard), two pianos, harpsichord, accordion, ondes Martenot, and harmonium. Being in such a northerly latitude in July, there was still light in the sky at the end.

The keyboard marathon took place in the Kuhmo Arts Centre, a venue that's the opposite of what the description arts centre usually implies in Ireland. It's first and foremost a 668-seat concert hall, built in 1993, obviously with the needs of the festival in mind. It has one of those breathtaking wooden interiors that the Finns bring off so well. The sound is good, too, in the kind of way that doesn't draw attention to itself, and lets you get on with listening to the music.

The light-filled Kuhmo Church - consecrated in 1816, completed in the 1860s and restored after Russian bombing in 1951 - seats much more than a thousand. One of the curiosities over the weekend was hearing organ music by Schubert and Brahms on its Sotkamo organ, an instrument capable of fierce and intense projection. The gymnasium of Kontio School, marked out for basketball and with hoops in place along the walls, works surprisingly well for concerts, although it wouldn't be anyone's first choice in terms of layout or comfort.

Among the highlights of my visit were a performance of Mozart's String Quintet in C, K515 (Ik-Hwan Bae, Vanessa Szigeti, Thomas Riebl, Ásdis Valdimarsdóttir, Jan-Erik Gustafsson) that said a lot with a minimum of fuss. Pianist Ralf Gothóni's handling of Schubert's song-cycle Die schöne Müllerinwas a miracle of many-faceted suggestiveness - his singer, baritone Stephan Loges, was pale by comparison. A perky performance of Beethoven's absurdly exuberant Andante and Variationsfor mandolin and harpsichord was given by Ugo Orlandi and Petteri Pitko. Violinist Pekka Kuusisto was his controversial, individual self in Dvorák, Brahms and Vivaldi. Hagai Shaham hit the stylistic spot in a faux-Vivaldi violin concerto by Fritz Kreisler. And clarinettist Kari Kriikku was fabulously flamboyant in the klezmer world of Osvaldo Golijov's The dreams and prayers of Issac the Blind. Not a bad haul, by any reckoning, and just the sort of experience to explain why chamber music lovers find themselves drawn back to the Finnish outback again and again.