The sun shone on Finland's biggest summer celebration of the arts - Michael Dervan reports on his five-day sampling of the Helsinki Festival

You might be wondering where the good weather went this summer. It certainly didn't come to Ireland in a year when some of the most dependable of sunspots had unaccustomed downpours, and central Europe is still living through the nightmarish aftermath of record flooding. You would have found other records being broken if you travelled north, where the Nordic countries basked in the sort of sunshine and temperatures normally associated with the Mediterranean.

The bad weather in June had a positive impact on audiences at the West Cork Chamber Music in Bantry. But the late summer sunshine in Finland didn't seem to have any negative effects on audiences for concerts at the Helsinki Festival, where two nights of The Grammar of Dreams, a "visualised concert" by leading Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, packed out the Alminsali auditorium at Finnish National Opera, and tickets for Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky's recital in the main auditorium were not to be had for love nor money.

Saariaho is one of a generation of composers who came to prominence in the 1970s, when she was involved in a movement which was known as Ears Open (Korvat auki) - the conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen (now music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic) and composer Magnus Lindberg are the two other members who have gone on to achieve high international profiles. Ears Open appears to have been less an aesthetic movement than a disparate grouping whose members saw co-operation as a means of getting things done, of making a musical impact, and of broadening the horizons of contemporary music in Finland.

Saariaho has been based in Paris for the last 20 years and has become one of the most accomplished of composers working in the electronic studio and marrying the worlds of live performance and electronics in concert. From the Grammar of Dreams, for soprano, flute, harp and cello, has been planned as a seamless event, a selection of existing works - Il pleut, Die Aussicht, From the Grammar of Dreams, New Gates and Lonh - contextualised with new linking music, and a ritualised visual presentation, carefully lit, with mirror-finished music stands and other reflecting panels strategically placed (including a mirror-paged book somnambulistically leafed through by the harpist) to suggest the layered unreality of dreams.

From the Grammar of Dreams was seen at the Huddersfield Festival last year, but the Helsinki version involves changes of personnel and resources, with the soprano Pia Freund bringing a touching human warmth that was absent from the more clinically perfect earlier version.

I'm not sure, though, that the overall concept is a successful one. Raija Malka's staging has something of the homogenised fashion images and immobile facial expressions that Hollywood used to visit on imaginations of the future before science fiction movies came of age. And, rather than adding a dimension to Saariaho's work, the visualisation seemed to reduce the music to an accompaniment for very second-rate theatre.

Saariaho's major achievement of recent years is the opera, L'Amour de Loin, premièred at the Salzburg Festival two years ago, and due to get its British concert premiére from the BBC Symphony Orchestra in November.

In Helsinki, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra under the rapidly-rising Susanna Mälkki performed a L'Amour de Loin "suite", which re-organises and re-distributes material from the opera and also includes newly-composed music.

I haven't heard the whole opera, but the suite, with parts for soprano (a hauntingly lingering Rachel Harnisch) and baritone (the more fretfully enamoured Vincent Le Texier) is a remarkable achievement, with colours seeping through orchestral textures like spreading dye, medieval evocations which seem both utterly old and utterly modern, and a captivating otherworldliness that's carried on a deep emotional undertow.

This concert also included a performance of Magnus Lindberg's Parada of 2001. This is the central section of a symphonic triptych which also stands as three separate pieces. As ever with Lindberg, the often impressionist writing, with suggestions of tuneful Sibelian surge and moments of chilling calm, constantly beguiles the ear.

It's not for nothing that Lindberg is regarded as the leading orchestral composer of his generation in Finland.

The other major recent Finnish work on offer was the 2001 Clarinet Concerto by Kimmo Hakola, whose new string quartet will be premièred in Dublin next December as part of the Crash Ensemble's Up North! festival of Irish and Nordic music.

The concerto, played by Kari Kriikku with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra under Stefan Solyom, is stylistic free-for-all, a sort of loose modern equivalent of those avant-garde effect pieces of the 1960s, which lived in the vibrantly acerbic gesture of the moment.

Hakola has found in Kriikku a soloist who can emulate in music the sort of gurning gyrations of the comic actor Jim Carrey, and can create the added frisson of essaying and achieving the impossible without any recourse to digital trickery. Hakola's music ranges from the sentimentally banal to the most exuberantly animated, and he borrows styles and references as he pleases. As an approachable virtuoso clarinet showcase there's probably not much to rival it, and it was greeted by the audience in the strangely asymmetrical, Alvar Aalto-designed Finlandia Hall with wild enthusiasm.

The festival also included a performance in the old, Russian-built Alexander Theatre, of incidental music to The Princess of Cyprus by the German-born composer Fredrik Pacius, a pupil of Spohr, whose 1852 Kung Karls jakt (The Hunt of King Charles) is a landmark in the history of opera in Finland. The performance compacted the action of the play into narration for a single speaker, and the simple presentation used back-projected images behind the array of choral singers to broaden out the audience's experience. The orchestral playing of the Tapiola Sinfonietta under Ulf Söderblom was pointed and lively, the music simple and straightforward (think of Irish composer Michael Balfe and you'll be in the right general area), but some consistently under-the-note singing from mezzo soprano Raija Regnell rather let the event down.

There were no such problems in Dmitri Hvorostovsky's recital with pianist Mikhail Arkadiev of songs by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov.

Hvorostovsky is a stylishly understated performer who gives the impression of achieving everything he sets out to do. The restraint is purposeful. The lack of redundant emoting makes the points of pressure more telling. It was interesting how the temperature rose when he shifted into Italian operatic repertoire in his encores.

The implication was clear - Hvorostovsky is an artist who needs to be experienced in the full context of opera for his real musical character to be revealed.