Our concert tonight was in the Musiikkitalo, also known as the Helsinki Music Centre and it was a program for choir and organ. My attention was drawn to the unusual sculpture of pipes outside of the case, and when Bill Potter asked me whether those were working pipes, I thought yes, they were.

Here’s what I found on the website:

The façade of the Helsinki Music Centre’s organ, which has been under construction since 2019, is now finished. The unique façade built in the Helsinki Music Centre’s Concert Hall during the past summer is in itself a visual work of art not unlike for example the façade of Disney Concert Hall’s organ in Los Angeles. The façade was designed by the organ building company Rieger Orgelbau’s organ designer Harald Schwarz and organ builder, managing director Wendelin Eberle. The handcrafted Rieger concert organ will be completed during the autumn of 2023 and inaugurated 1 January 2024.

The Helsinki Music Centre’s organ will be an exceptional instrument consisting of 124 registers and state of the art technology. As a visual element, some of the wind lines that traditionally run inside the organ have been made visible for everyone. The curved elements of the façade consist of both, sounding pipes and wind lines. When it comes to the scale of the instrument, it is quite telling that the organ has altogether some 260 metres of lines and pipes 3D printed out of wood-plastic composite. The organ will be one of the world’s largest modern organs in a concert hall. Another specialty of the organ is its two consoles, of which one is mechanically connected to the organ and the other can be freely moved on the stage.

The program we heard tonight was called “The Echo of Cathedrals,” and featured the Finnish Music Hall Choir and organist Susanne Kujala. Except for one composition by her husband, Veli Kujala, I have played all the repertoire on this concert. The program was:

Prelude in D major, BwV 532a (Johann Sebastian Bach)
O for the wings of a dove (Felix Mendelssohn)
Aurora Borealis (Veli Kujala b. 1976)
Rejoice in the Lamb (Benjamin Britten)
Prelude and Fugue on B-A-C-H (Franz Liszt)
Chichester Psalms (Leonard Bernstein) — the boy soprano solo was sung by a girl in tonight’s concert.

I was curious as to whether the Lutheran Church of Honolulu choir had sung Britten’s “Rejoice in the Lamb” since my husband Carl retired, and the answer was ‘no.’ According to my records, we performed in four times during our tenure there: 06-10-84, 05-19-91, 06-11-00 and 05-04-03. I remember the organ part as extremely difficult to play!

I could say the same for the Bernstein “Chichester Psalms” organ accompaniment, which I performed under Carl’s direction on 05-22-83, 06-07-87, 06-04-95, all in the regular Sunday morning worship service. I also performed the work in a concert with the University of Hawaii on November 20, 2015, just a few days after I had returned from Italy. (See my post “It was a dark and stormy night.“)

Earlier in the afternoon, we went to St. John’s Church to hear Mauriz Brunell play a masterful performance of the Liszt “Ad nos” in a program called “Five O’Clock Organ,” which I enjoyed very much. The Walcker organ was big and not overly loud or obnoxious. From Wikipedia, we read:

The organ was built in 1891 by German company Walcker of Ludwigsburg, with a pneumatic mechanism. At the time it was the largest in Finland. In 1921, composer Oskar Merikanto, the first church organist, expanded the organ. In 2004 and 2005, the organ was renovated by German organ builder Christian Scheffler Orgelwerkstatt [de]; it now has 66 stops and 4,036 pipes.

Mauriz Brunell teaches church music at the Sibelius Academy and works as a cantor in the Swedish Parish of Espoo.