`What do you think of my nature?" The man is wearing neat spectacles, an immaculate suit, a deep tan and a broad grin. He waves his pint of beer amiably. Clearly he expects an answer. I rack my brains, but they've been thoroughly scrambled by the fact that though it's nearly midnight, the pub's beer garden is still bright: that, and the slightly dismaying prospect of an impromptu pop psychology discussion with a Finn I've never seen before in my life. As I hurtle towards panic I notice that he is waving his beer in the general direction of the lake. "The trees! The water! The fresh air! For us Finns," he rearranges his face into a semblance of solemnity, "the nature is everything".
For us cynical city-dwellers from the south, such a statement is at once outlandish and enviable. You read it in every guide-book and tourist pamphlet - "the Finnish people have a symbiotic relationship with nature"; "Finns prefer solitude in the wilderness to the hustle and bustle of city life" - but until you fly over the lake district of the south and east of the country, you don't really understand why. And then, spread out beneath you like a shattered necklace dropped by a demented giant, is a glittering blue-green jigsaw: 190,000 lakes and 180,000 islands. Only the Finns, surely, would be bothered to count.
Somewhere in the middle of it all is the town of Savonlinna, whose annual opera festival has been a top-notch European event for much of its 30-year history, partly thanks to the excellence of the Finnish and international casts it attracts, but mostly thanks to its stunning setting - Olavinlinna Castle, a 15th-century pile built to protect the main water routes through the Savo lakeland while Finland was part of the Swedish Kingdom. It was first used to stage opera in the first decade of the last century, but plans for a permanent festival were scuppered by the first World War, the Russian Revolution, Finland's Civil War and ensuing economic difficulties, and the festival in its present form dates from the late 1960s.
Pictures of Olavinlinna (the name means Olaf's Castle, St Olaf being the patron saint of the locality) are so spectacularly gorgeous that even the most ardent opera fan would suspect the real thing to be a disappointment. It isn't. As we strolled from Savonlinna's pretty market square along the edge of the lake on a balmy evening last July with our amiable host Timo Auvinen, managing director of Finnish Lakeland Tourism - "you can tell the state of the economy just by coming down here; the boats shrank dramatically during the bust in the early 1990s" - the enormous walls suddenly loomed above us, a suitably forbidding backdrop for the dark and devious emotions of Verdi's La Forza del Destino.
The castle courtyard, we found, had already been invaded by opera-lovers in fancy frocks. "Evenings can be cool in the Castle, even in summer," the programme points out, with typically Finnish thoroughness, "so you are advised to dress warmly. A rug may prove very welcome. The Castle passages and floors are uneven, so wear stout shoes . . ." The same passages, of course, are a designer's dream, and as Verdi's monastic tragedy unfolded, processions of monks and soldiers seemed to materialise out of the castle itself, adding a note of shivery realism. From time to time the awning stretched across the courtyard rattled and flapped in what was evidently, at battlement level, a stiff breeze, adding to the festival atmosphere - for the year 2000 and ever after, however, the festival has commissioned a new, hi-tech, pre-stressed steel awning which will, no doubt, slide into place with scarcely an audible click.
This year's festival opens on July 1st, and offers, in addition to La Forza del Destino, Gounod's Faust, Strauss's Elektra, a colourful Israeli Opera take on Donizetti's L'Elisir D'Amore and an old favourite, Savonlinna's delightful production of Mozart's Magic Flute, sung in Finnish. The festival will also premiere a specially-commissioned millennium trilogy, The Age of Dreams (also to be sung in Finnish, but all operas are surtitled, so no worries there), which tells the story of mankind over two thousand years in three distinct yet linked sections; a choral opera, a love story and a re-interpretation of the Crucifixion. There are also a number of concerts including a Lieder recital by Galina Gorchakova, a harp recital by the Dutch harpist Willy Postma and Paavlo Berglund conducting the castle orchestra and chorus in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
For visiting culture vultures, however, a trip to nearby Retretti art gallery is an absolute must. Situated 26 km from Savonlinna in the midst of some of Finland's most attractive landscapes, it is easily reached by bus, rail, or a two-hour boat ride, and its sleek purpose-built interiors house superb exhibitions. During our all-too-brief visit last summer we gazed in awe at a comprehensive show by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, which, naturally, included the 1895 The Scream; a glorious selection of Finnish contemporary plastic art and textiles, magically displayed in a cavernous underground space; and a stunning display of hyper-real landscapes by the Russian painter Arhip Kuindzhi. The Munch exhibition has moved to Helsinki, Europe's cultural capital for the year 2000, and the Kuindzhkis have presumably returned to the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg - but whatever you do, allow a full day to savour Retretti, because you'll need it.
And then, of course, there's all that nature. The summer light in Finland (even during the day, never mind at close to midnight) is quite extraordinary - all that unpolluted air, no doubt, combined with the open, clean lines of the architecture - and the lake water is, literally, good enough to drink. Finns spend their every spare moment at their summer houses, which all have mini-saunas, bathing platforms, lots of birch trees and very little else. "You don't need to do things," one resident explained as we spent a peaceful hour sharing his lake view. "When you're here, you're just here." Finland au naturel, you might say.