Super-idyllic Savonlinna lies deep inside Finland – four hours by bus from Helsinki or a short 45-minute flight. A postcard-perfect town in the midst of some of the country’s most beautiful nature, where lakes, islands, and forests endlessly flow into one another. On a small island rises a raw yet well-preserved medieval castle, perfectly sized to hold a stage and more than 2,000 audience members in its courtyard. That was precisely why the idea for an opera festival emerged here in 1912 – one of the oldest of its kind in the world.

Opera can be many things – affected, extremely moving, snobbish, tear-inducing, dreadfully boring, or simply too much. This very range makes it the most fascinating – and the most expensive – of all the musical art forms. The question is whether it makes a particular difference that a production takes place in such picturesque and historically authentic surroundings, or whether the castle merely functions as decorative scenery, adding a feel-good effect for an exclusive audience enjoying their white wine with extra pleasure during intermission at a genuine medieval fortress.

In its own understated way, sound art is an eternal revolt. When Jacob Kirkegaard turns his ultra-sensitive microphones toward the Earth’s interior, toward agriculture, or toward an abandoned reactor core, it is for the same reason that sound ecologists have, for decades, insisted on documenting changing landscapes: we need to be reminded that there is an entire world of information – of life, history, memory – that we have either forgotten to listen to or simply cannot hear with our limited ears.

And we must understand that what we fail to hear are alternatives to the reality we see unfolding around us – a reality whose development we rarely feel we have any real influence on. The point: those who listen closely can see what blind progress overlooks.

This quiet resistance is the driving force behind Witness Stand, a sound art walk at Refshaleøen in Copenhagen, framed by Australian sound hippies Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey.

I don’t know what Danish opera would do without the Copenhagen Opera Festival. Ten days with dozens of operas, concerts, and all kinds of events – talks, interventions, work-in-progress showings – officially kicking off on Friday but already starting today, Wednesday, with the premiere of Josefine Opsahl’s EKKO, which in itself is only the first part of an entire operatic cycle on gender and identity.

Everything that otherwise has a hard time finding space in the established opera scene in Denmark – where experiments and new works are rare – gets a place here: a James Black mockumentary inspired by The Office, Faun Vium and Amanda Drew’s psychosis study Dronning Annabell, Poulenc’s La voix humaine transformed into nightclub-style smartphone reflections, the follow-up to OPE-N’s critically acclaimed LOL – Laughing Out Lonely, now focusing on domestic violence… The list goes on seemingly forever.

My first lesson in music theory occurred in my early teens while listening to a cheap transistor radio under the blankets when I should have been going to sleep. On air was a Top 40 AM station, an odd eclecticism where psychedelic music followed singing nuns, while new hits rocketed to the top of the charts and others headed for landfill. The business model was to sell my attention to the advertisers and whatever the advertisers were selling to me, yet I took no notice because in the United States everything is on sale all the time. The DJ who pretended to be everyone's best friend used songs and jingles to fish with hooks and earworms. It was all fascinating, but something was troubling me, in a homegrown existentialist way.

The Borealis festival plays with our expectations – precisely because it constantly undermines them. Marketed as a »festival for experimental music” and a well-kept secret among music lovers across Europe, it is actually at its weakest in the classic concert and performance formats, where it rarely becomes truly experimental. One example is the traditional concert with the Norwegian Navy Band, which this year featured premieres of works by Herborg Rundberg, Jason Yarde, and Kari Beate Tandberg. Here, the truly experimental move would have been to take a critical approach to the format itself – to the wind band as a historically and politically charged formation, also in Norway. But none of the three composers took up this challenge, and the result in Bergen Cathedral sounded exactly as one might expect from a military band – spiced with some impressionistic wave-like movements, since it was, after all, the navy and not the army playing.

Jennifer Walshe stod sjældent stille på scenen. Den irske komponist og performer speed-snakkede, sparkede ud efter trommeslageren og kæmpede med rummet som en prædikant fanget i sit eget feedback-loop. Hun gentog mantraet »We want eternity«, men rablede også om exorcisme og selvudslettelse. Keyboardisten fra Ensemble Nikel rullede en sovepose ud midt i det hele. Performancekoncerten Minor Characters – skabt af Walshe i samarbejde med Matthew Shlomowitz – fremstod som en kakofonisk sitcom i opløsning. Et skævt, lækkert skrattende Herzlich Willkommen til Berlin.

Melencolia – åbningsforestillingen på Berlin-festivalen MaerzMusik, skabt af Brigitta Muntendorf og Moritz Lobeck – greb samtiden an på en helt anden måde.