Sounds good: Helsinki's new concert hall

When Finland tore itself free from Russia after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, its leaders discussed what the independent country's first building should be. "A concert hall," said someone, to general assent. The nation had, after all, been conceived by Jean Sibelius in Finlandia, back in 1899. It would not exist without music.

Plans were drawn and a hillside site allocated in central Helsinki. Then it was pointed out that the new state might need a parliament. The site was reassigned and the hall was put on ice during a brutal civil war, two Russian wars and enduring poverty in a culture that is ever prepared to grit its teeth and wait.

When peace prevailed during the neutral age of Finlandisation, the concert hall project was given to the next most famous Finn after Sibelius. Alvar Aalto was an architect of world renown for his "functionalist" buildings in which every steel joist and glass wall was fit not just for purpose but for its unity with lake and forest surrounds. The new hall was to be named Finlandia and finished for the composer's centenary in 1965. Six years late, it opened in 1971 to the accolades of a grateful nation. There was only one dissenting voice. It belonged to my late friend Seppo Heikinheimo, chief critic of the mass-readership Helsingin Sanomat. He declared the hall an acoustic disaster. He was ostracised and sent on leave, cold-shouldered by every right-thinking Finn.