In Helsinki you can trust so-called classical music

If we can’t trust bankers, economists or debtors anywhere, at least in Helsinki there are still quite a few things you can trust. You can trust

… that Stokkers will go mad  twice a year.

… that it’ll be rainy and cold in late October.

… cold and rainy enough to need lots of firewood and other warm stuff for the Occupy Helsinki Camp/real democracy activists who have set up tents behind Sanomatalo. They are camped (quite legally) in the area that some call Kansalaistori (Citizens’ Square) (though for some users it’ll cost ya, a snip at the citizenly price of 49 000 Euros…)

You can trust the city and Helsingin Leijona to make a hash of the “regeneration” of the area around Helsinki’s Senate Square like the old Kiseleff Bazaar (where Stokkers once was, by the way). And don’t even mention their English language web pages!

You can also trust Finns in service professions to respond to shortcomings with an appeal to technology (“our computer system doesn’t…”) rather than an apology and a smile.

But above all trust this city to offer up good classical music.

That is how JHJ got to see those world-changers’ tents in the first place. An aged relative offered a ticket at very short notice for today’s early evening concert.

So who cares if Helsinki’s new Music Building/Centre reminds some people of a business park and infuriates others with its crush to get coats. (LPR Architects – what happened there?)

To others the building pulses with rhythm and emotion, and with perfection that’s rare in these untrusting, impatient, times.

Today’s concert by the Helsinki Philharmonic featured a melodious new work by veteran composer Aulis Sallinen. Nice enough as it was, and impressive as Okko Kamu’s conducting looked, it seems the audience were there to celebrate and lap up the warmth and virtuosity of Aale Lindgren.

Lindgren wasn’t just the day’s soloist, he is “orchestra member of the month” according to the programme. Which is worth translating and quoting at length.

I am Aale Asser Armas Lindgren, I was born 17.11.1951 in Kemi. I guess I spent my first year in Haukiputaa old people’s home, apparently happyfying its elderly residents. For a few years I was fostered in the same parish after which I was moved into a large family in Sipoo.

…

Song was one of our great joys. Our teacher … founded a choir in which most of the singers must have been my dark-eyed co-residents. Often the teacher gave me solos, which I greatly enjoyed.

…

So-called classical music got a hold of me early on, but I kept my passion to myself afraid that the other children might mock me for it.

…

My real family has been the Helsinki Philharmonic, which adopted me in 1972, 1st of September at 10 in the morning. The sisters and brothers with whom I have had the pleasure to have played, are large in my heart. My fathers have been conductors … mothers I’m still in want of.

The audience I have always loved and love I’ve received in return.

Apologies to all for such a long quote. Hope you liked it.

A good beet for liquid times

The September sun is shining on Helsinki. People are out and about as if it were August. Some are in shorts, one man is seen in swimming trunks for goodness sake!

The Usual (paid version) runs unusually high-flying but to-the-point stuff on the need for solidity (Helsinki’s new Music Building!). Like the prime minister said, we really do need uncommercialised culture in our flaccid (my word), chaotic (the journalist’s word) and liquid age. The reference to liquid modernity being, of course, from veteran sociologist Zygmunt Bauman.

The blogosphere and Face Book are awash with what reads like real debate on the built environment. On the Music Building (are there traces of Lutheranism in how it presents itself? in Finnish here; did our ministers misjudge the situation by skipping its opening ceremony? and such like). But comment is flowing also on the area around the building. It needs some action, upgrading and serious thought.

Hopefully anything then but the robot-inspired/produced vision of a perfectly engineered Finland or so-called future Finlandia Park on the city’s website. You have been warned, the vision isn’t just scary, it’s insulting when you recall all the human-style life and true urban trading that went on in the railway warehouses that we fought to keep. (By the way, according to MTV3, it seems that the drive to take life as well as cars underground might yet mean pulling down what’s left of that socially if not architecturally significant trace of an older Helsinki.)

So meanwhile it was heart-warming to see that despite the best efforts of Helsinki’s bureaucrats and local politicians to kill off anything unofficial, street parties can still bring out the crowds. And the wannabe ballerinas as seen last night at Punavuori’s Punajuuri/Beetroot block party.

Prim and proper. And bleedin’ good acoustics!

Even in the early days of September 2011 there is good news in the world: Helsinki’s Music House is open and it is an acoustic dream. And one that’s enjoyed by a good number of cycling concert-goers too.

OK, it may be a bit dull on the outside, and even the acoustics may not be perfect. But it’s been built so that there is scope to tweak things as musicians work out how the place works in practice.

It’s not actually the first ever purpose-built music hall in this city (as a few blogs suggest) but it’s a damn site better than all of ’em. So far so popular.

After the (first!) opening concert people were assessing the whole both in terms of its architecture (“a bit on the cool side”, “a bit dark”, “a lot of stuff hanging off the ceilings”) and in terms of its acoustics (ranging from “a bit on the cool side” to “brilliant”).

Everyone had an opinion. Including Gramophone magazine. And for once I think this was good. Something this big, this expensive and this significant deserves to be greeted with close scrutiny and careful, even critical, attention.

JHJ was very pleased (lump in throat moment) also to see the last of the evening’s several conductors, Sakari Oramo, give credit where credit was due. After the Stravinsky he went over and hugged the acoustic engineer, Yasuhisa Toyota. Him, of LA’s Walt Disney concert hall fame.

Oramo’s hugging of Toyota’s Finnish architect colleague  Marko Kivistö, ws a bit more prim.

Which brings me to one of the more unexpected observations of the evening. It had to do with the challenges the building poses for audience members showing even a bit of leg. The railings on the upper tears of seating, well, they are open to everyone else’s view.

This is in order to support the acoustics, I heard it said.

As reported on the MTV website, music journalist and producer Aarno Cronvall had noted this too:

Aarno Cronvall huomautti, että läpinäkyvät katsomon kaiteet asettavat haasteita naisten istumistavalle. Gronvall herkistyi vertaamaan konserttisalin elastisuutta ja viettelevyyttä naiseen, joka kävelee pehmeästi korkokengillä ja jättää jälkeensä ihanan herkän parfyymin häivähdyksen.

or

AC pointed out that the transparent railings of the auditorium posed challenges to ladies’ sitting postures. Cronvall was moved to compare the concert hall’s elasticity and seductiveness to a woman who is walking softly on her heels, trailing a lovely hint of delicate scent.

So. We got our our Music House with its decent acoustics, a bit of calm into the cityscape near Töölö Bay, some uncharacteristically lyrical journalism. And we even got some bicycle storage.

That would be around the other side, where the Sibelius Academy entrance is.

 

Third time lucky? Soul and acoustics in Helsinki

There are times when just a teeny-weeny bit of life on an increasingly abandoned blog, even written by one with more pressing demands on her time, might be excusable.

Today is one. Jonathan Glancey, an architecture critic so beloved of our editorial staff (me) that he gets more tags on this blog than many a real architect, has graced the pages of Finland’s one and only national paper with his thoughts on Helsinki’s new Music Centre to be opened later this month. Alas, if you don’t actually pay this Finnish quasi-monopoly, instead of Glancey’s observations, you will only get to see others’ responses to a survey about the building.

So what does Glancey think? He’s impressed and not impressed. We hope the text will be found at some point in English, but for now it’s just mentioned in his column inThe Grauniad (which you can still access for free).

The thing that got me – a bit – was this:

Kun pyysin ihmisiä vertaamaan rakennusta johonkin, heille tuli mieleen “konferenssikeskus”, “ostoskeskus” tai “saksalaisen autonvalmistajan toimistorakennus”.

that is:

When I asked people to compare the building to something, they said it brought to mind “conference centre”, “shopping mall” or “a German car manufacturer’s office building”.

Definitely not nice.

Now, having written less than flattering things about the building, not to mention the non-process of planning that’s accompanied its construction, I have gradually begun to change my mind about this addition of calm, unobtrusive, anti-iconic architecture in the heart of my beloved city. Architectural novelties in Helsinki have namely not been particularly uplifting recently. More like down-plonked, as Glancey himself notes, architectural rubbish (my words), thin additions to the city brought here by some gargantuan helicopter (Glancey’s image).

So why have I changed my mind? Because calm and just a little bit disciplined is exactly what this part of Helsinki needed and calm and a little bit disciplined is what it’s got. The sharp but low-profile profile of the music building creates the beginnings of a new horizon where before there was haphazard mess created by the forced marriage of gently curving Kiasma to boring but big Sanomatalo (contemporary corporate clunk put there courtesy of the above-mentioned monopoly, as we noted a long, long time ago on this blog).

Glancey’s text also notes the absence of soul in the building. Yes. He may well be right. But I still live in hope that the incestuously squabbling but delightful music-types in Finland’s successful classical music-scene will, in good time, make up for this. I also hope that Glancey’s little plea to create a really lived city at the end of his article is read and understood by as many Helsinki planners and developers as possible. Over and over. Here a couple of snippets, the first on what Helsinki once managed but appears to have forgotten:

… Helsingin arkkitehtuuri on niin usein onnistunut maagisesti löytämään raikkaita, mutta samalla visuaalisesti ja teknisesti jykeviä ideoita, jotka tuntuvat pikemminkin kasvavan kaupungin peruskalliosta kuin tulleen arasti pudotetuiksi sen pinnalle.

… Helsinki has so often succeeded as if by magic to find fresh but visually and technically robust architectural ideas that seem to grow out of the city’s own bedrock rather than having been timidly dropped on its surface.

Then he goes on to describe what sounds like a pretty perfect city. People, shops, life, trams and all things bright and beautiful right here in the heart of what is still a pocket-sized, harmonious and enjoyable capital city.

Oh, almost forgot. Not the point about our absence from the blogosphere coninciding with the threat of the Basics in Finnish government but the point about the acoustics in the Music Building (I prefer that to Centre and it would be a better translation of the Finnish, just like Basic Finns would be a better translation of Persut than True Finns). Ask Finnish musicians and they’ll tell you that Saint Alvar, for all the good he did for Finland, thoroughly messed up when it came to acoustics. Twice! At the House of Culture and in the Finlandia Hall. This time we’d better get a good sound.

Back in Boomtown

I know I’m back in Helsinki, crane-filled boom-town. I woke up to a god-awful explosion that took place some dozens of metres below my bed – BOOOM!!! At some minutes past nine in the evening (listening to the storm brewing outside) I hear what I hope is the last blast of the day. BOOOMM!! I am wrong. Another dose of the dynamite sends shudders through the granite at a few minutes before ten. BOOOMMMM!!!!

A letter from the building manager is among the less boring bits and pieces that I gather up from between the outer and inner front doors as I return. (This being Helsinki, my post doesn’t drop into some tin box by the sidewalk or flop onto a cutesy doormat, it gets wedged ever deeper and thicker between two extremely functional doors, one that opens in, the other that opens out. In the absence of a picture of a door to the stairs, here’s a pic of a Helsinki double-glazed window, circa 1902).

The letter informs us politely that residents are to ensure compliance with legal requirements by installing one smoke alarm per 60 square metres of living space.

It goes on:

In the Töölö area each day one can hear series of explosions. These emanate from the tunnelling works for the car parking being constructed underneath the Music Centre [I still think it should be called Music House] and the Finlandia Hall. … we recommend residents keep an eye on the walls and ceilings of their properties for possible cracking. Any cracks should be reported … and compensation …

Yes, a little money to shut up the old ladies from Töölö might be forthcoming. But, I ask, what about stopping the cancerous “growth machine” or the “boomtown” phenomenon that’s at the core of this car-friendly excavatory madness? The battle between jobs and resources/environment about which Americans write so much and with such eloquent anger?

Not likely in Helsinki as the new Pasila is being planned with its new multi-lane highway, while underground parking caves are being dynamited into existence throughout the Helsinki peninsula.

Note to self, blog about the odd coincidence of having just finished Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, the one with mountain-top-removal (I still struggle with the idea that that is an intelligible concept!) at the heart of its plot (kind of) and flying back to Finland only to read that some people think that its future landscape will be one great, f***ing moonscape of an open-cast mine, by 2020. (To explain, from living off the forest to living off Nokia, it’s not a mad idea to suggest that Finland may soon be living off its minerals…)

Blast! And winding down…

It’s a delight and a luxury to travel by sea to Helsinki (from Tallinn, this time) even if friends routinely warn me of the dangers involved. (For the uninitiated, we are talking alcohol, noise and vomit as key ingredients). But how wonderful when land comes into view, rocks, skerries and islands too, and suddenly you’re there.

Time, though, is money. Your average urban dweller isn’t going to have too much of it. And your average traveller will go by plane. I guess gradually JeesHelsinkiJees will also wind down and disappear. There is not enough time to blog.

Meanwhile, that lovely Helsinki institution, Dodo ry (the environmental organisation for townsfolk) is gearing up to celebrate urban life this Saturday with its annual Megapolis event. This year they are seeking better rhythms for the city. Any city, but Helsinki in particular. This would involve more cycling, walking, strolling, swimming, rowing and skateboarding and, perhaps, skiing. And, presumbaly, doing those things in style, with a kind of urban panache, like Copenhagen is known for.

Meanwhile, living as we do in the vicinity of the cluster of building sites near Töölö Bay, we are aware that even if Helsinki is keen to free up more space above ground for all that nice stuff, underground the city busy tunnelling. For what? To get more cars to fit into the city.

We know this because around these parts we get to hear the dulcet booms of 21st-century technology as it blasts its way through ancient granite. Two Parliament buildings’ worth (by volume) just for the parking and service tunnel for Finlandia Hall and the new Music House, according to MTV.

Enough people over about five years have had enough time to get upset about the blasts – often at night – to fill the internet with variously reliable information about it. I asked the “isännöistijä” or the guy who manages our block of flats and he told me it’s the Music building car park. I think I believe him.

P.S. How boring that they’ve decided to call Musiikkitalo Music Centre. Music House would have been so exotic!