Notes of intrigue
Scented SF Symphony performance smells like success to me
A futuristic combination of light, sound, and scent left me somewhat hypnotized and spellbound.
Sometimes I forget we live in the future, albeit not the flying DeLorean version many of us thought might exist in 2024. A recent performance by the San Francisco Symphony gave me more Logan’s Run or Brave New World, demonstrating how technology can change our collective experience while also being a touch ominous. The flashy performance commingled light, sound, and scent in ways I think some people might view as just a pretty show. I personally felt much more.
This weekend marked the world premiere of Alexander Scriabin’s 1910 tone-poem Prometheus, The Poem of Fire, a multisensory experience featuring pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet and conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony. The performance incorporated fragrance and colored lighting effects as envisioned by the Russian composer, aiming to immerse the audience in Scriabin’s synesthetic intention, or connection between two senses.
Smell was what everyone talked about, but my eyes transfixed on a circular apparatus of LED rods that hung above the symphony. Designed by Luke Kritzeck, this metal oval pulsated waves of color in step with the symphony’s performance, and I only stopped staring at it when I felt equally enthralled by wooden drums placed throughout Davies Symphony Hall. Like a kid at Disneyland, I nudged my boyfriend when the drums glowed, changed color, mechanically lowered their front covers, and then shot out rings of smoke like a 1950s film starlet dragging on a cigarette.
Admittedly the aromas themselves were fine; each one a custom-made fragrance by Mathilde Laurent, perfumer for Cartier, in partnership with San Francisco Symphony. More than anything they gave us something to talk about: “What do you smell?” we’d ask each other after each scent. My favorite was the first, L’avant, which smelled like earth just after rain started — appropriate to the performance the day I went, as it was pouring. Smells are as subjective as they are powerful, evoking memories for many of us but also discomfort, depending how your nose is calibrated. For me, the two scents that followed l’avant mostly reminded me of essential oils during a bubble bath.
The aromas lingered in pretty smoke clouds during the symphony’s second performance, a haunting opera about a woman touring a castle with an interior coated in blood. Where Prometheus gave me a hypnotizing dystopia, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók definitely evoked Edgar Allan Poe meets Brothers Grimm. The performances by Michelle DeYoung and Gerald Finley somehow achieved a positively chilling tale that was also probably the best operatic performance I’ve heard.
Whether you should see it depends on the kind of evening you’re after. Judith demands to see behind seven locked doors, each with various horrors that her husband warns her not to ask about. Here the oval apparatus came back into play for each room; red lights symbolized the torture chamber with blood on its instruments, green for Bluebeard’s garden, gold represented his crowns and jewels, and then the whole auditorium lit up as Judith and Bluebeard looked at his vast lands. The performance played out like a bedtime story you’re not sure you asked for, with Judith joining the ranks of Bluebeard’s three other silent wives who are weighed down by his finery.
What I loved about these performances was not so much what I felt, but how much I felt. An evening with the opera, ballet or symphony often means donning something glamorous and escaping into a world of pretty music; it isn’t a time I expect to strongly react. And while this recent visit of course had its pleasant elements, it unfolded more like any great piece of art: It made me think about the nature of the creation and likewise, it made me reflect on my own reactions and what the artist intended. Was it amazing? Yes. Was it haunting? Also yes. The San Francisco Symphony surprised and delighted indeed.
Saul Sugarman is editor in chief of The Bold Italic.
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