Toadette, the Frog Opera is part of Tête à Tête’s: The Opera Festival 2022. Photo: Kristin Hurst

FINLAND is a land of lakes and trees: a massive country with a relatively tiny population. But when it comes to music, it punches way above its weight. The smallest towns have serious concert halls and festivals (one of them, the very modest Lahti, has a hall better than anything in London!). And the Helsinki conservatoire turns out star conductors by conveyor belt – which is why you get so many of them at the Proms (from the established Sakari Oramo to the glamorous newcomer Klaus Makela), and why there’s yet another focus on Finland on August 26 when the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra breezes into the Albert Hall to play Sibelius’s 5th Symphony.

It’s a nature-piece (they usually are), inspired by the composer’s experience of wild swans in flight. And it’s nicely paired with an English musical incursion into ornithology, Vaughan Williams’s immortal Lark Ascending, played by Finnish violin virtuoso Pekka Kuusisto. If you’re a serious birder, take binoculars.

Other proms highlights coming up are two great choral works, starting with Bach’s B Minor Mass on August 29. A period-conscious performance from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment directed by the always fiercely energised John Butt, it has choice soloists including soprano Mary Bevan and countertenor Iestyn Davies. Expect bright singing and fast speeds.

Meanwhile, celebrating the fact that giant choral works are back on the agenda after Covid closed them down, there’s a grand, massed-voice performance of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius on August 31, with the fabulous Allan Clayton and larger-than-life Jamie Barton among the soloists. A fervently Roman Catholic work about death and the afterlife, it was written at a time when Elgar was devout. Sadly, in later years he lost his faith and dismissed the afterlife as “mumbo jumbo”. But the work survives as a statement of belief, and you’d have to be a tough case not to be affected by its ardour.

All Proms details at bbc.co.uk/proms. And if you can’t get to the Albert Hall, everything goes out live on BBC Radio 3, remaining accessible on BBC Sounds.

• The Proms aside, this is down-time for classical music in London – except (and they’re notable exceptions) the two small-scale alternative-opera festivals that run at this time of year: Grimeborn at the Arcola Theatre, Dalston, and Tête-à-Tête at the Cockpit, Gateforth Street, NW8.

Grimeborn’s ear-catcher this week is a production of Bartok’s chilling Bluebeard’s Castle, a piece scored for just two solo voices but a massive orchestra (that, for these purposes, has been massively reduced to a chamber group). Runs August 31-September 3. arcolatheatre.com

But for something beyond different, over at Tête-à-Tête there’s a potentially charming little opera about crossed-love between a frog and a toad in which, as the publicity tag puts it, “cold blood runs hot”. Called Toadette, the Frog Opera, it was written by a precociously talented 13-year-old Swiss boy, Jack Dauner, with a libretto by his mother and first done as a puppet opera.

Now it’s been adapted for human performers (dressed no doubt in slimy green), who are travelling over from Switzerland to sing it. Likely to transform the way you look at pond life, it plays August 29. tete-a-tete.org.uk