So here I am standing in the northernmost cathedral in Europe staring up into the face of an elephant. The Nidarosdomen, in the Norwegian city of Trondheim, is a miracle of 12th-century stonemasonry, festooned with gargoyles of every possible shape: goats, monkeys, dogs, dragons… and extremely cute elephants. If Pixar ever designed a Gothic cathedral, this is what it would look like.

The Nidarosdomen is my first stop on a quick sightseeing jaunt around Trondheim before the annual Chamber Music Festival gets started tonight. Guest of honour and composer in residence: our own Brett Dean. His face is plastered around the town on billboards and posters, and I can’t help feeling a flush of national pride. Our boy has definitely made good.

But before the Festival begins – and I’ll talk about the musical delights later – I’m captivated by the beauty of this scrupulously conserved little Nordic town. Architecture here is piously lo-fi: one- and two-storey weatherboard buildings with ornate casement windows, all painted in pastel greens, yellows, pinks… In the city centre, the only flat bit, these dolls’ houses cram the cobbled laneways, while the wide boulevards are lined with the elegant fin-de-siècle apartment buildings that are standard issue in most European capitals.

Trondheim is a port city of many hills, so from most places you get a vista which is some permutation of harbour, mountains and the River Nidelven (the man in the bicycle shop told me Nidelven means “River of Pain” – but he was wearing an Iron Maiden T-shirt). I joined the flocks of cyclists who, without helmets, scoot along the tramlines and footpaths. All forms of transport appear to navigate with total fluidity. Altogether, the town plan is a masterpiece of pragmatic, tasteful Scandinavian design: the components of Trondheim fit together as smoothly as pieces of an IKEA sofa.

The opening concert of the city’s Chamber Musical Festival offers the audience a – well, I suppose I’ll just go ahead and say it – smörgåsbord of its 2011 program. And this year has a surprisingly Australian flavour. Apart from Paul and Brett Dean, there is also Aussie countertenor David Hansen, whose 2011 schedule looks like a particularly ambitious Kontiki tour  – this young singer is in very hot demand in Europe right now. Another highlight for me will be hearing violinist Anthony Marwood, who toured so memorably with the Australian Chamber Orchestra last year. British pianist Susan Tomes, best-known as a member of the Florestan Trio, and violist Kim Karkashian (not to be confused with you-know-who) also make an appearance tonight, alongside other musicians I’m looking forward to learning much more about.

In the meantime, the Festival organisers have found a novel way to coaxing its guests around the city – and involve the locals too. It’s called the O-Løp – the “Orientation Lap”, pronounced “Ooh-lerp” (the Norwegian ø is a schwa, for the linguists among you). Performers from the festival are stationed at various spots around the town. When you hear a performance you get a stamp on your O-Løp loyalty brochure and move on to the next. See all eight and you get a prize. The real prize, though, is hearing the Telcea Quartet or Brett Dean (on viola) and his brother Paul (clarinet) busk out on the street. Not to mention gaining a closer acquaintance with this immensely genteel little city state. So this is what Rousseau was going on about…