Nov. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Osmo Vaenskae, the Finnish music director of the Minnesota Orchestra in Minneapolis, is looking forward to the opening of a new music center in Helsinki. He doesn’t have anything nice to say about the acoustics in Finlandia Hall, the city’s current main concert venue.

“Every time that I’ve been there as an audience member, I’ve felt that I wanted to turn the volume button louder,” Vaenskae, 56, who performed at the hall early in his career as a clarinetist in the Helsinki Philharmonic, said in an interview. “If you have to play there every day, it kills a bit how you produce sounds. You start to press more.”

For almost four decades audiences have endured poor sound when listening to the Nordic nation’s top classical musicians, who include Vaenskae, fellow conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the soprano Karita Mattila. That was because of the poor acoustic planning by Alvar Aalto (1898-1976), the Finnish architect behind the fan-shaped white marble hall, which opened in 1971.

After years of discussions, Finland has become serious about remedying the problem, shelling out 140 million euros ($208 million) and hiring a top acoustician to create a new music center. Additional time to prepare the site, and bids that exceeded the original budget, led to a delay of two years. The center, now 50 percent over its initial projected cost and financed by the city of Helsinki, the federal government and YLE, Finland’s public broadcaster, is set to open in 2011.

Jazz to Electronics

The building will feature a 1,700-seat main hall and five smaller rooms for performances from chamber music to jazz to electronic pieces. Finlandia Hall will continue to function mainly as a convention center.

“Finlandia was a catastrophe from the beginning because it was never really planned together with acoustic experts,” Gustav Djupsjoebacka, rector at the Sibelius Academy music school, said over coffee in his Helsinki office. “Aalto wasn’t really interested. He was creating his fantasy and his vision.”

This time around the project organizers have designed the new hall with the acoustics in mind, bringing in Yasuhisa Toyota, the Japanese acoustician behind the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and Suntory Hall in Tokyo. The 52-year-old Toyota, who works at Nagata Acoustics in Tokyo, was selected for the Helsinki project because of Salonen, who was conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic when the hall was being built.

“I called Esa-Pekka and asked who would be the best acoustician, and he named Yasu,” said Helena Hiilivirta, the project’s 54-year-old director and a former study mate of Salonen’s at the Sibelius Academy. “We had in the rules of the competition that whoever wins had to work with him.”

Clean Design

The music center, designed by Finnish firm LPR-arkkitehdit Oy, embraces Scandinavian design, with clean, functional spaces. The exterior generously uses patinated copper to visually link with the green copper roof of nearby Finlandia Hall and a glazed glass foyer surrounds the concert hall.

The auditorium itself features double-paned, insulated glass walls on the main floor, allowing people inside the hall to see out to the foyer and into the park in front. A curtain between the glass panels can also be shut during performances.

While the music center’s location is a plus because it’s in the center of the city next to the main railway station, the choice of building site turned out to be costly.

The hall lies on an old sea bottom and a large part of the building is underground to avoid obstructing the view of the parliament across the street. The hall sits inside a “reverse” swimming pool made of concrete and stone, which is dry on the inside and wet on the outside.

‘Stressful Time’

“This is maybe the best possible place for the building but the site is one of the worst possible spots,” Juha Lemstroem, 52, who’s the center’s chairman, said with a laugh. “That was a stressful time,” he said of the planning process.

Aalto’s failure acoustically has helped realize his dream of creating a cultural zone along Toeoeloenlahti bay, where Finlandia Hall is located. The new music hall will sit between Finlandia and the Kiasma modern-art museum. The opera house, opened in 1993, is on the other side of Finlandia and there’s now talk of building a new city library in the area as well.

The bay, which currently ends before the concert hall, will be extended in front of the music center via a shallow pool to visually link the buildings along the waterfront.

Sound Standards

Toyota, who built a scaled replica of the center to test the acoustics prior to construction, opted for a hall with seating in the terraced, vineyard-style similar to the one in Berlin, the first concert hall to employ that type of design. Toyota sends his assistant once a month to make sure work on the hall meets acoustical standards.

“I think the experience when it’s finished will answer the question of why we need this,” Djupsjoebacka said of the acoustics. “They will kill us if it’s bad because this is the reason we built it.”

For his part, Vaenskae says building any new concert hall, no matter the best intentions, is an acoustical unknown until the first performance takes place.

“In a good hall, the music surrounds you. It’s like being inside the instruments,” Vaenskae said. “I just cross my fingers that it will be good. You never know.”

To contact the reporter on the story: Chad Thomas in Helsinki at cthomas16@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 22, 2009 19:00 EST