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“PROMETHEUS” PERFORMANCES are already uncommon, and even rarer is one which goals for synesthetic expertise. Often, the rating stands alone. When colours are added, it’s nearly at all times via lighting design. Salonen has performed the piece twice earlier than: as soon as with out added results, and as soon as in what he described as “a type of disco” manufacturing that he discovered too coarse for the music.
One day, he acquired a dinner invitation from Thibaudet, who pitched his and Laurent’s concepts for “Prometheus.” Salonen rapidly realized that Laurent’s concepts weren’t only a gimmick — certainly, that they had been “critical enterprise,” he stated — and determined to “hop on the practice, as a result of it gave the impression to be a great one to hop on.”
Salonen is liable to this sort of hopping as one of the vital technologically curious conductors at the moment. He turned Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” right into a video and sound set up that embedded viewers members all through the orchestra; has experimented with digital actuality; and, a decade in the past, starred in an Apple advert marketing campaign that confirmed how completely entwined the iPad, then nonetheless younger, was together with his work. By the time Apple launched its Vision Pro early this month, he had already tried it and was starting to consider how you can apply it to classical music.
He has additionally embraced using video projections in live shows, which might be divisive. When the attention is concentrated on a display, it’s not centered on the orchestra, and vice versa. Works that incorporate visible components inevitably end in a contest of the senses.
“Prometheus” is completely different. Salonen described it as “a collaboration of senses” that Laurent stated was rooted in science. Through the neurological analysis she has tracked through the years, she has realized that scent and sight activate completely different areas of the mind. “Olfaction goes on to amygdala and hippocampus, and it’s not going to cortex,” she stated. “It is just not going to the explanation. It goes simply to the intestine, the worry, the intuition, and likewise to the reminiscence.”
The trick, at Davies Hall in October, was to get the senses activated on the identical time. The engineers that Laurent labored with, Yves Cotarmanac’h and Yvan Regeard of Agence Desind, developed the vortexes, which disperse the fragrances with theatrical aptitude, and the diffusers, which accomplish a lot of the identical with out being seen. The scents are non-aerosol, that means dry, in order that they received’t linger or bleed into each other.
