I love Dresden. It’s a city with a special history (a treasure-house of European culture, brutally destroyed in 1945 but now spectacularly resurrected), a hotel that ranks among my favourites (Palais Taschenberg, built as a royal love nest, bombed to rubble, but restored now to its former Baroque glory), and a music festival that few in Britain seem to know about but is a big event in Germany. Pre-unification, it was the GDR’s answer to Edinburgh: a sprawling platform for the arts designed to show the West how civilised the East could (sometimes) be. These days there’s no political agenda, but it’s still a festival with strong convictions about tolerance, diversity and peaceable existence: ideas rooted in the way the city reads its past. The theme of this year’s festival was time: a concept not too obvious from what I heard while there, except that everything took place in venues that could only leave you looking forward to the time, next year, when Dresden gets itself a proper concert hall. There isn’t one right now, because the GDR-built Kulturpalast, an unlovely 1960s block too obviously of its time, is under reconstruction. So the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra was playing in the makeshift gallery of a museum. The visiting Singapore Symphony Orchestra was in the Frauenkirche, a fabulous space but with a bathroom acoustic. And the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain – a band that tours the world flogging Whimsical English Humour – was bizarrely onstage at the glorious Dresden Opera House where Strauss and Wagner are more standard programming. Massed ukuleles do in fact say something about time: a little of them goes a long way, and the threshold of endurance is 10 minutes. But the German audience liked them – and went comparably wild about the Singapore SO, despite a leaden Mendelssohn Violin Concerto which the soloist Gil Shaham tried to brighten up, with marginal success. The orchestra did better with a new piece by a Singaporean composer, Chen Zhangyi, whose Ethereal Symphony was an atmospherically immersive score suggestive of the warm, damp otherness of Asian climes. I’d never previously heard of Zhangyi, but he’s clearly somebody of substance. Young (born in 1984), and interesting. As is the Russo-German pianist Igor Levit, who was playing Beethoven with the Dresden Philharmonic and reminding everybody why he counts among the world’s outstanding players under 30. An intensely thoughtful personality, refined and focused, his engagement with the hyper-smiley Vassily Sinaiski, who conducted, had the awkwardness of minds not altogether met. But Levit is a star – not in the showy manner of a Lang Lang, but of real musicianship with an interior life that shines out. Seriously impressive.