Salonen plans concert with smells
NewsFrom Janos Gereben, San Francisco Classical Voice:
The San Francisco Symphony and Cartier are pleased to announce a multisensory performance of Alexander Scriabin’s Prometheus, The Poem of Fire, March 1–3, 2024 at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco.
Devised by San Francisco Symphony Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and Cartier in-house perfumer Mathilde Laurent, this collaboration marks the world premiere of an immersive presentation of Prometheus that combines a dynamic musical and light performance with olfactory curation.
Read on here.
Very easy for San Fran: just open the windows at Davies Hall and it will get smelly pretty quick. The smell of weed, stale urine and feces are common nowadays in that city.
Do you live in San Francisco? If you do you ought to get out more and enjoy the fresh air. San Francisco is no worse, and even better, than other big cities these days.
Perfume compared to Salonen’s compositions.
Well, they could start with the smells outside – the area has the piquant aroma of urine and feces thanks to the homeless, mentally ill and drug abusers. Oh, wait. Newsom just had it cleaned up for Xi’s visit.
But then…in many orchestras now they ask players to not wear any perfumes or anything emitting odors since some people are allergic. So now we’re going to expose everyone to some of these smells? Caveat emptor.
Valery Gergiev has been doing concerts with smells for years. His own, that is. Think, mountain goat herd in Dagestan.
No concession to the many people suffering from “fragrance sensitivity”!
Campfire smell?
Allergics can stay away.
What a “great” plan…
Misguided effort from musical wokerati.
“olfactory curation”?
Why the need?
Perfumery as an art form is very young. It did not properly start to develop until the invention of synthetic vanillin. Like music there is a time component to perfumes—they “develop” because aroma molecules evaporate at different rates, and clever perfumers manage to tell stories based on this fact. Also like classical music you need to train your nose (ear) in some way to really appreciate the art: to be able to articulate what makes a perfume interesting as opposed to just pleasant. Unlike music new “notes” are still constantly invented or discovered by chemists. Matilde Laurent is highly regarded in the industry. All this is to say this has the potential to be very interesting.
Thank you for your positive comments. They are getting harder to find these days of constant negativity.
I have a feeling that Scriabin would have approved of the idea. (No doubt he would have wanted to micromanage the choice of scents and timing of their release.)
Yeah, I’m pretty sure his plans for the unfinished Mysterium contained this. (It was also supposed to bring about the end of the world after its week-long performance.)
When I read, with pleasure, NL’s post about the Hockney/Yuja Wang event in London, I noticed that he talked about immersion in all five senses. Not sure about taste and touch, but don’t believe there were any smells in that event, I thought. And now here’s the fifth sense, in this Salonen collaboration. I also note that there is a commercial element here from the maker of the scents. This is part of a cheerful harnessing of commerce with art that, though certainly not new, has been embraced by Yuja Wang in her Rolex and other sponsorships. Not only does this reflect the international world as it now is, but I suspect may enlarge the audience for classical music. I don’t expect everyone to agree . . . But I think it might be true.