Music | An organ is being built in the music house so big that you can walk inside it

Austrian by Stephan Niebler the cell phone shows about an octave of piano keys, seven white and five black. He presses one of the keys, and a great crash is heard in the concert hall of the Musiikkitalo.

It comes from the Chamade sound stage of the organ under construction at the Musiikkitalo, whose resonators point horizontally towards the auditorium from the back wall.

At the end of February, a group of employees of the Austrian Rieger organ factory spent the entire ski holiday week inside the organ of the Musiikkitalo, when concert activities in the hall were on break. So it was a perfect moment to spread out in the hall and build an organ, the previous opportunity was last summer. Recorded by Stephan Niebler and installers Martin Behringer and Albert Moosmann worked the day shift during the ski holiday week, while the night shift was led by the head sound engineer Alois Schwingshandl.

The next time the organ will be erected is in the next holiday season, i.e. next summer. The organ is scheduled to be completed this year, and the opening concert of the organ’s festive week will be held on New Year’s Day 2024.

“This is the second largest organ we have ever built,” says Rieger Orgelbau organ builder Martin Behringer. The largest is the 134-voice organ completed in 2020 at Vienna’s Stephansdom. The Musiikkitalo organ is not far behind them with its 124 tones and is in any case one of the largest concert hall organs in the world.

Volumes are the basic units of the organ’s sound, because each tone creates its own timbre. In practice, one note is therefore a row of organ pipes, one pipe for each pitch. All the whistles in one round sound with the same timbre. In addition to many timbres that create an organ-like sound, organs always have imitative timbres: one might imitate, for example, the fanfare-like timbre of a trumpet or trombone, another the soft sound of a flute. The Chamade recording, which was worked on during the winter holiday week, is designed to imitate the sound of a trumpet – and with its horizontal resonators, also the appearance of trumpets.

Combining different sounds, i.e. registration, is part of the organist’s professional skills and shows his artistic vision. So when the Musiikkitalo organ has 124 sounds, there are thousands of individual organ pipes in the organ.

The fine-tuning of the individual organ pipes and the intonation of the voices, i.e. the harmonization and tuning of the sound, was also connected with the contracting of the Rieger organ builders’ skiing holiday week, i.e. the recording of the organ. The organ pipes are pre-built at the Rieger factory in Austria, and they are installed in the organ on site in Helsinki whenever the concert hall is free – practically during Finnish holidays when the concert series are on breaks. During the week of winter vacation, the builders were able to install about ten sound systems in addition to the technical installations.

A music table built in a transport box has been brought onto the stage of the concert hall, with which the builders can test the sound of the whistles from the hall. When the organ is finished, it can be played either from a mechanical soundboard installed on the right side of the organ, or alternatively from a movable electric soundboard, which allows the organist to get on the performance stage in the company of other musicians.

Rarely it can be walked inside the instrument, but there is room in the large organs – at least at this stage, when all the voices have not been installed yet. Normally, outsiders have no business inside the organ, as the instrument is full of various organ pipes. Now the places of the missing whistles, i.e. the openings through which air enters the whistles, are protected with colorful tapes. Of course, even at this stage, you have to watch carefully where you step so you don’t accidentally step on the whistle.

And whistles come in many sizes, because the pitch is determined by the length of the whistle’s body. The lowest sounds are produced in the massive 32-foot or almost ten meter long whistles, which therefore rise from the level of the concert stage far towards the ceiling of the hall. Instead, the highest sounds are produced in the two-centimeter-long whistles, which the casual passer-by should be especially careful when moving inside the organ.

In the finished organ, there are only a few maintenance corridors left for the whistles, but Rieger’s employees move nimbly inside the instrument during the installation phase. They install the instrument one whistle at a time, listening to how they sound and adjusting them if necessary.

Martin Behringer presents the features of modern organs. The organ is an old instrument: the earliest organs are from ancient Greece, from the 2nd century before the beginning of time. In them, the pressure of the air passing through the organ pipes was regulated with the help of water. In later times, the air pressure needed to play the organ was obtained from the bellows and their pedals, until in the age of electricity, blowers and compressors were used to blow the air.

They are also in the bellows rooms of the Musiikkitalo organ in the basement and in the attic above the organ. But the organ also has completely new technology, as can already be seen from the cell phone control used by the recorders. In addition to traditional mechanical parts, the organ has electronics and information technology, both of which can be updated, as is often done, says Martin Behringer.

“The organ has a network connection, so if problems arise, we can connect to the instrument from Austria. Once, one of our technicians updated the software of the organ we built in Gothenburg while on vacation on a sandy beach in Croatia,” says Behringer.

In the year The Musiikkitalo organ project, completed in 2011, has taken a long time. A place for an organ has already been reserved for the concert hall in the planning phase, but due to the need to save money, the organ project was stopped. So, for about twelve years, concertgoers have been able to watch the empty wall behind the orchestra. If an organ was needed in the piece being played, a digital player was used.

In concert use, such a one does not fare well in comparison to a real acoustic organ, and digital organs also eventually spurred the Musiikkitalo organ project into motion.

In 2015, it was performed at Musiikkitalo Kaija Saariaho organ concerto Shadows of the Earthand not an electric instrument made the desired effect alongside the orchestral part. A couple of years later Saariaho donated from his father’s legacy to the Musiikkitalo organ, one million euros, i.e. about a quarter of the entire project’s costs. Saariaho’s donation also enabled the foundations and the main users of the Musiikkitalo to participate in the costs of the organ project.

“There was an opportunity to donate one million euros, and I decided to use it this way. I imagined that if I can do this, the house owners and others can no longer remain indifferent”, Saariaho told in 2017 for HS.

And now the organ is being completed at a good pace. The organ began to be installed in the concert hall in the summer of 2021.

Acting as one member of the organ working group Pekka Suikkanen says that the corona pandemic messed up the organ delivery schedule somewhat, and it was decided to postpone the commissioning by a year. But after the organ is officially put into use next New Year’s Day, the organ will indeed play more frequently in the hall.

In order to finance the concert activities, the Urut soimaan donation campaign has been established, which has already collected more than 200,000 euros. In the first year, more than 20 organ concerts will be organized, some of which are connected to the international Kaija Saariaho organ composition competition organized in honor of the new organ.

The new ones with the organ, the Musiikkitalo concert hall will finally be completed in its intended form. Not only will the new organs be visually striking and different from tradition, they will probably improve the acoustics of the concert hall even more. The project has also included the originally planned acoustics of the hall Yasuhisa Toyota.

“The players have already said that the acoustics have improved when the mass of the organ has come behind the performance stage,” says Pekka Suikkanen.

Read more: The world’s largest concert hall organ will be built in the music house

Read more: The organ of the music house is built by the Austrian company Rieger Orgelbau

Read more: Kaija Saariaho donates one million euros, and the Musiikkitalo gets an organ