October 10, 2025

Helios – new organ concerto

Premiere of Helios – Concerto for Organ and Symphonic Wind Band at the Helsinki Festival 2025 was an extraordinary event with stellar performance by Jan Lehtola and the Guards Band conducted by Petri Komulainen. I’m very grateful for having the opportunity to have such a fantastic debut at the Helsinki Festival. This is what dreams are made of!

It took me over a year to composer Helios, and it felt to some extent like a trip to an unknown territory, or floating in space discovering new wonders all the time. We worked in close collaboration throughout the year with Jan Lehtola on the solo part, and I’m very grateful to have had this opportunity. The learning curve with this magnificent Rieger organ of the Helsinki Music Centre has been steep, yet highly rewarding.

The work on Helios begun a few years ago from Jan’s initiation to commission a large half-an-hour piece for the new organ, which didn’t yet exist at the time. Years later, during the process of composing the concerto and workshopping on the newly built organ I soon realized that not only does it have exceptional features (such as microtonal registers and flexible wind system to name a few) it is quite a different instument when put in a concert hall. In the concert hall, a much less reverberant space than a church, the organ can have a very different role from the one we associate it usually with. The expression pallet can range from very intimate, subtle sounds to expressive ones, from being a chamber music partner into being a heroic soloist, from using more fragile overtone registers with interesting tuning and timbre into a devastatingly loud pillars of octaves and fifths. The concerto itself is an opportunity to explore these roles as well as think of relationship between the soloist and the orchestra as a reflection of the society – the individual and the groud coexisting in different ways.

After a long process of composing Helios, revisions and editing the final score was finished at the end of May 2025. Composing for the symphonic wind band was a new encouter to me as well. I decided on a strategy where the organ would have all the microtonality, while the orchestra would concentrate on adding dynamic roundness and detailed subtle textures to overall sound. I was very happy to discover that not only did the microtonality in the organ part blend well with the equal tempered material by the wind band, but the results were coherent. The two instruments blended together to form a super instrument with its rather unique timbral possibilities. Thanks to the profound work by Jan Lehtola on the solo part and conductor Petri Komulainen on the score, the two orchestras seemed to come together very easily during only one rehearsal together. It felt rather magical.

While composign Helios, I was able to create two works from its materials, Voyager 1 for solo organ and another version for organ and electronics, which both were premiered by Jan Lehtola at Musica nova Helsinki 2025. Since then Jan has performed the solo version already several times.

In addition, Helios received highly postive reviews:

“One of the most eagerly awaited premieres to date was Maija Hynninen’s Helios for organ and wind orchestra, written for Jan Lehtola and the Guards Band […] A chord played at full blast before it slowly dies away forms the climax and is preceded by a relatively long lead-in. But more than the dramatic arc itself, one is struck by the interaction between the solo organ and the orchestra, which never quite allows itself to be overtaken even by the most powerful forte. In short, it’s as if Maija Hynninen with Helios took a large step closer to a place in the sun.” Wilhelm Kvist, HBL

“Helios is a staggering half-hour journey through the cosmos. It opens with tentative stardust sparks from the organ’s highest registers, sent out by Lehtola. The musicians who respond to the organ gradually carry listeners forward through ever-thickening fields of space debris toward a warmly receptive sea of sound. Being embraced by the landscapes, energy and masses illuminated by the enormous sun isn’t always comfortable, but the voyage to infinity offered by Hynninen, Lehtola and the Kaarti musicians was well worth experiencing.” Annmari Salmela, Helsingin Sanomat

Photo credit: Sakari Röyskö