Stavanger in Norway will be one of the 2008 European Capitals of Culture, and its recent International Chamber Music Festival was a strong dress rehearsal, writes Michael Dervan

The city of Stavanger on Norway's southwest coast has both a canning museum and an oil museum. The canning of fish was the city's major industry up until the 1960s. Norway's transformation into an oil economy turned the city into a major centre for the oil industry, the natural location for a museum with donated drill heads, intricate models, and reams of awe-inspiring facts and statistics about the modern process of oil-retrieval.

The city's population currently stands at 117,000, and it's home to a lot more than oil-company headquarters and a famously well-preserved historic network of 19th-century wooden houses. It's got its own symphony orchestra, which has already adopted aspects of the modular orchestra that people such as Pierre Boulez have mapped out as the future. Within the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra itself, there's SSO Contemporary for new music, and SSO Classical for older music - the orchestra currently works regularly with early music specialist Fabio Biondi, following on relationships with Philippe Herreweghe and Frans Brüggen; and the orchestra also organises its own chamber-music concerts.

The current concert hall, a converted exhibition centre, is to be replaced by a pair of new performance spaces, one for orchestral music (the traditional, shoe-box shape of the auditorium was set before the architecture competition was held), and one that will accommodate more diverse fare, including rock concerts. The NOK1.3 billion (€162 million) project is even planned to allow the second hall facilitate open-air performances, with one of its side walls designed to transform it into a giant stage.

Stavanger has been chosen to be a European Capital of Culture in 2008, a status which, with a projected budget of NOK300 million (€37.5 million) must make the organisers of Cork 2005 and the failed bidders for Belfast 2008 blanch with envy.

"Open Port" is the vision for Stavanger 2008, and one of its features is a preparatory period, with projects taking place in the two years of build-up to the formal launch. The Stavanger International Chamber Music Festival, which was founded by leading Norwegian cellist Truls Mørk in 1991, hosted one of the advance projects last week, a visit by the St Petersburg Chamber Choir under Nikolai Korniev, for a series of performances which included Rachmaninov's Vespers.

This is without a doubt - and deservedly so - the best-known piece of Orthodox-inspired music from the first half of the 20th century. And hearing it performed by one of Russia's leading choirs (with a black bass in the line-up as a sign of the times) was a treat by any standards. The choir also offered a mixed bag of Russian music, from Tchaikovsky down to the present, with the first of three short pieces by Dmitri Smirnov the most fascinating of all, a disconcerting shard that was teasingly always headed somewhere unexpected.

The festival holds its concerts in Stavanger's 12th-century cathedral, the building a mixture of Norman and Gothic, with a richly-carved baroque pulpit providing a multi-coloured visual surprise at the side of the performing area. Rather like St Canice's Cathedral in Kilkenny, the acoustic is a lot clearer than you might expect, an outcome that may well be helped by the flooring, which, in another unexpected touch, is of wood.

Due to a misprint in the programme book I arrived late for the festival's main celebrity concert, and heard Midori play Ernest Bloch's Second Violin Sonata from behind the last row of seats. The sound was large and clear, better in fact than in the very front row, where I heard the Japanese virtuoso's highly polished but rather chilled delivery of Schumann's Fantasiestücke Op 73, and her expert handling of Schubert's dangerously elaborate Fantasy in C.

Midori seemed a kind of an oddity in the festival line-up, doing her own thing with the very able and very biddable pianist Charles Abramovic in a festival where most other performers were mixing it up and ringing the rounds of possible combinations.

The hard-working Norwegian pianist Håvard Gimse impressed for his stylish adaptability, especially in a programme with the clear-voiced soprano Isa Gericke, where he encompassed delicately suggestive Ravel and fresh-minted Mendelssohn.

The Grieg Trio, the festival's current artistic directors, gave a wholesome, hearty, unglamorised account of Mendelssohn's C minor Trio (the one where the chorale treatment gets rather out of hand), and they opened a Grieg gala concert, marking the centenary of the composer's death, with a judiciously full-blooded account of his Andante con moto for piano trio. The Grieg programme also included a highly energised account of the composer's unfinished Second String Quartet (by the Zeuner Quartet, which draws its membership from the Stavanger orchestra) and a fluidly paced reading of the C minor Violin Sonata from German violinist Kolja Lessing and the busy Gimse.

Lessing provided one of the week's real musical highlights in a performance of Bartók's knotty Solo Violin Sonata that was intellectually, technically and musically commanding. It was the kind of performance that reminded one of the truth behind all those assertions of this being the most important solo violin work since Bach.

Elsewhere he also offered clean and lithe performances of two of Telemann's Fantasias for solo violin.

The Auryn Quartet from Germany were at their best in rich but not heavy performances of Brahms's G major String Sextet and G minor String Quintet, for which they were joined by orchestra members Wouter Raubenheimer and Ilmari Hopkins.

Other performances which stood out in what was often a low-key festival were the sweet delicacy of local violinist Ingerine Dahl in Schubert's Sonata in C, D384 (another outing for the indefatigable Gimse), an urgent, sometimes idiosyncratic account of Beethoven's Appassionata from English pianist Michael Roll that delved into areas of personal expression that were not often explored during the festival.

But, for me, the week's real humdinger was a new music programme at the small recital hall of the Institute for Music and Dance. Two utterly fearless performers, soprano Eir Inderhaug and pianist Ellen Ugelvik, offered riveting performances of George Crumb, György Ligeti and Vanessa Lann.

Ugelvik sang with something of the chameleon-like transformational skill of the late, great Cathy Berberian. And Ugelvik sounded as if she owned every note in everything she played. Unforgettable.