It’s just before midnight on Friday. A few hundred couples circle the floor of a school gym. On stage, violinists play a rhythmic music which cycles repetitively. Coloured with sad, minor notes, it sounds like a stately ancestor to bluegrass. Hands joined, the couples raise their arms above their heads. The woman spins. Breaking the link, the man suddenly bobs downwards, hops up and spreads his arms apart in a come-hither gesture. His partner’s raised hands say no. Linking arms at the waist, they resume the circuit.

Back in the 19^th century it was violinist Ole Bull who put Norway on the musical map, likened by Schumann to Paganini and celebrated across Europe for his supreme virtuosity. More recently pianist Leif Ove Andsnes has emerged as the nation’s classical champion, a rare performer whose taste is equal to his technique. But with not one but two young Norwegian soloists making their BBC Proms debut this summer, the newest generation of classical musicians has the potential to take Norway still further into the heart of the classical establishment.

In Bergen’s Grieg Hall (one is tempted to say the Hall of the Mountain King) the 2013 Bergen Festival concludes with the mournful tolling of bells. A consonant “Amen”, like a healing benediction, is the last word and with it comes perhaps a glimmer of hope. But the mood is sombre not celebratory. Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, for all its theatricality, would be an unlikely choice to close a festival in any year but this - Britten's hundredth anniversary.

Everything seems so free and easy, so do-as-you-darn-well-pleasey, in the Stockmanns’ fjord-view model home. Cheery friends in bright 1970s clothes drop in to chew the social cud as well as Mrs S’s cooking; only her medical-officer husband’s mayoral brother jars, and surely he’s too daft to be taken seriously. So when the good doctor finds irrefutable proof that the waters of the town’s new spa are poisoned, the weight of liberal opinion will surely back him up and all must be well, right?

Continuing its voyage through Scandinavia’s music, theartsdesk opens the latest chapter in Norway with Still Life With Eggplant, the 16th album from Trondheim’s prolific, long-lived, occasionally challenging and always vital Motorpsycho.

If you go down to the woods today, it’s possible a Huldra might be encountered. A Norwegian wood, that is. She goes by other names across Scandinavia, but this be-tailed woman is to be avoided. Men lured into her lair are never seen again. Thale turns the legend on its head and tells the tale of Thale, a Huldra who’s been captured by a man and imprisoned in his basement. The story of the Siren-like Huldra is one that’s ripe for a film treatment, especially after Norway’s Troll Hunter became an international hit. Unfortunately, Thale is somewhat undercooked.

The carillon is the world’s heaviest musical instrument. It consists of a collection of bells, usually played via a keyboard. There’s one in Oslo’s town hall, many tons of bronze whose sound reverberates daily across the Norwegian capital. Hendrik Weber – AKA Pantha du Prince - is a German techno DJ-producer. He’s at the arty, modern-classical end of the spectrum, as interested in Steve Reich as Carl Craig. Hearing Oslo’s carillon he was inspired to make it the centrepiece of his fourth album.

Gil Scott-Heron: The Revolution Begins – The Flying Dutchman Masters

Kieron Tyler

Christmas might not seem the most appropriate time to ask you, dear reader, if you’ve ever suffered a nervous breakdown. Yet for many this festival of conviviality amid the darkest hours of the year exacerbates a sense of loneliness and desperation. The break in routine, so welcome for most of us, can become a swift passage to the mental abyss. Snow, that magical, muffling coating of the damp, dark everyday world can appear – particularly in the northern countries – relentless and oppressive, yet another manifestation of a visual world that is veering out of control.

Ah, cosmic disco. We’re not supposed to call it that anymore as the DJs and producers who popularised it half a decade ago don’t like it - but that’s what this is. To cut a long story short, a bunch of Norwegians rediscovered a sound that had been popular in Italy in the early Eighties, disco’s electro-funk groove but extended and spaced out, somewhere between Giorgio Moroder and a big fat spliff. The main names among these Scandinavians were Todd Terje, Prins Thomas and Hans-Peter Lindstrøm.