BSO’s Scriabin cloaked in multi-hued spectacle of light
One paradoxical aspect of music’s power as a wordless art is that this very power sends us constantly reaching — for words — to describe it. Words, that is, and metaphors.
Among the metaphors of choice over the centuries has been the notion of musical “colors.” Think of all that impressionist “tone painting.” Or the German technique of instrumentation known as Klangfarbenmelodie or “sound-color-melody.”
But, as the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s current Music for the Senses festival makes clear, another lineage of composers has taken this insatiable will to metaphor in a rather more literal direction. These are the artists informed by synesthesia, composers for whom the sensory pathways appear to cross, such that music overflows the banks of aural perception and manifests in the mind not only as sound but as actual colors. Olivier Messiaen — whose massive “Turangalîla Symphonie,” to be heard here April 11 to 14, should mark the climax of this festival — once described one of his own harmonic modes as “blue-violet rocks speckled with little gray cubes, cobalt blue, deep Prussian blue, highlighted by a bit of violet-purple, gold, red, ruby, and stars of mauve, black, and white.” Everyone got that?
The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin was the featured synesthete on Thursday’s color-themed program in Symphony Hall, which culminated in Scriabin’s “Prometheus, Poem of Fire,” a work completed in 1910 for solo piano, large orchestra, chorus, and — wait for it — tastiera per luce, or “color keyboard.” This was to be a newly invented instrument that would enable the composer to transpose the music’s sound into a wide variety of colored light. But
Scriabin was not satisfied with the results yielded by the technologies available at the time and so the work’s overlay of actual colors was scrapped. The piece, whose Moscow premiere in 1911 was led by future BSO music director Serge Koussevitzky, has since made its way “only” as music.
Of course technology later caught up with history, and these days colored smart bulbs in your living room can be controlled from any phone with Bluetooth. In this case, the BSO partnered with scholar Anna Gawboy and lighting designer Justin Townsend to serve up a high-tech spectacle that was presumably closer to the polychrome “Prometheus” that Scriabin first imagined. On Thursday, a circular disc with 12 protruding LED tubes hung at the back of the stage, looking at once mythological and modernistic, a bit like a giant sunburst clock that Zeus might have brought home from Design Within Reach.
After Andris Nelsons’s downbeat, the tubes (controlled by a keyboard played by Vytas Baksys), flashed out their multi-hued visual overlay on top of the music. In the hall, darkened for the occasion, the novelty effect was quite striking. Just how much it added to the overall listening experience on a deeper level is harder to say, and probably varied greatly from listener to listener. From the podium, Nelsons drew out a precisely rendered account of the score from the massed forces on stage (which included the Tanglewood Festival Orchestra and the pianist Yefim Bronfman), though I found myself wishing for a reading that leaned further into this music’s own lurid washes of color, its wild, mystical sensuality, its fire stolen from the gods.
The rest of Thursday’s program offered variations on similar themes, beginning with Anna Clyne’s Rothko-inspired work “Color Field,” its meticulously blended pastel chords rendered with impressive care. We were given another view of Prometheus courtesy of Liszt’s eponymous symphonic poem, and rounding out the program was Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from “Tristan und Isolde.” This is something of a party piece for Nelsons, and he drove its pacing with a more clearly crystallized interpretive vision. Indeed, if by color one means expressive shadings that speak beyond themselves, the Wagner here was the most vibrant of all.
The Music of the Senses festival continues through April 14, and suggests a notably broader tent than usual, in both its programming and its convening of musical minds from across the city. The Saturday (April 6) repeat of this Prometheus program will be preceded by an intriguing panel titled “How We Hear: The Evolution of Music Perception”; another intriguing panel on April 10 will address the future of music and health, followed by a performance by forces from NEC, Brandeis, and beyond (featuring works by Messiaen and Morton Feldman, Marti Epstein and Tod Machover). And the formidable MIT-based Gamelan Galak Tika crosses the river for a pre-concert demonstration prior to the culminating performances of Messiaen’s mighty “Turangalîla.” Nice to see programming, too, with a bit of color.