Mathilde Laurent, Cartier’s perfumer, has created a scent poem that enhances the experience of Scriabin’s synesthetic score for “Prometheus.”
Lobbing scent bombs: Wooden vortexes, developed to shoot rings of scented smoke, were installed at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco.Credit...Damien Maloney for The New York Times
Sniff test: Arnaud Buronfosse, Cartier’s compliance and technical director, inspecting the scents.Credit...Damien Maloney for The New York Times
Loading a vortex cannon into the elevator before installing them in the symphony hall.Credit...Damien Maloney for The New York Times
The performance will have colored lighting as well as scents.Credit...Damien Maloney for The New York Times
The “Prometheus” team, from left: the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, the perfumer Mathilde Laurent and the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen.Credit...Damien Maloney for The New York Times
By Joshua Barone
Reporting from San Francisco and Paris
Feb. 23, 2024, 5:02 a.m. ET
It was time to smell Scriabin’s “Prometheus: The Poem of Fire.”
This music, from 1910, has an element of synesthesia in its score, which calls for a color organ — a keyboard instrument that projects lights of a dozen hues — along with a full orchestra, a piano soloist and a choir. But in October at Davies Symphony Hall, the home of the San Francisco Symphony, the piece was being prepared with an additional sense in mind.
A group had gathered in the auditorium to test an almost unheard-of idea: that a performance could be accompanied by something like an olfactory poem, a narrative series of perfumes released through diffusers between seats and a set of futuristic cannons, called vortexes, that were developed for this occasion to shoot out rings of scented smoke.
Onstage, the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet practiced his solo part in “Prometheus,” which the San Francisco Symphony will perform March 1 through 3, while the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen listened attentively to the wooden vortexes as they were being tested; the sound they made while emitting smoke, he noticed, was nearly a G.
Mathilde Laurent, Cartier’s longtime perfumer, who had designed the scents, double-checked notes on her iPad. For this day’s test, without the orchestra, she wanted to be sure the diffusers were timed to match the music. So they were going to play a recording overhead.
They had settled on one that Claudio Abbado made with the Berlin Philharmonic and the pianist Martha Argerich in the 1990s. After the Breton engineers who had designed and assembled the vortexes told everyone to take their seats, the “Prometheus” team quieted down, and waited.
If everything worked as planned, Scriabin’s already sensuous music would, combined with the smells and lighting, take on an overwhelming power that Thibaudet described as “like a drug” that leaves you “stimulated from everywhere: your nose, your ears, your eyes.”
The recording began to play, its opening passages to be accompanied by a scent designed to evoke chaos. Laurent looked down at the diffuser next to her seat, and then picked it up and held it to her nose. So did one of the engineers, repeatedly, until the music stopped and the lights came on. Salonen, reading the concern on their faces, said: “That’s the beauty of this thing. It’s uncharted territory.”
Laurent turned to a colleague and said in French, “It didn’t work.” The diffusers hadn’t released anything, and there would have to be another test.
THE SCENTS FOR “PROMETHEUS” were designed in Laurent’s offices at the Cartier headquarters in Paris. There, she operates out of a top-floor suite designed with monochromatic serenity, to which she has added a touch of stylish disorder. The library of her nearly 1,000 perfume ingredients is a cross between a laboratory and a kitchen: Plants grow out of glass tubes and round-bottom flasks; coffee is served in a beaker.
More than a scientist, though, Laurent operates like a philosopher or an artist. “To live is to breathe. To breathe is to smell. Therefore, to live is to smell,” she likes to say, and wrote in her memoir-manifesto “Sentir le Sens.” A proud Corsican who has been with Cartier since 2005, she aims to represent ideas more than concrete, familiar odors in her perfumes. Hence names like “Baiser Volé,” or “Stolen Kiss,” which implies sensations beyond the fragrance’s lily top notes.
Her work isn’t so different from that of a composer. Both imagine something entirely new, and are capable of perceiving it before it exists. Both deal in ephemeral experiences “whose goals are eternity,” she said. And both operate in a specific language: When inspiration strikes and Laurent can practically smell a new scent under her nose, she writes down its molecular formula, which she then refines in the laboratory. The finished product survives on the skin for mere hours, but like a score can be revived endlessly.
Laurent doesn’t embark on a project unless it makes airtight sense, whether for Cartier’s brand or her own ideas about perfumery. In the case of “Prometheus,” the connection between the myth and her craft was immediately clear. “Perfume in fact means ‘per fumare’ in Latin,” she said: through smoke. “So, this ‘Poem of Fire’ is actually very significant to a perfumer like me.”
She was introduced to the piece by Thibaudet. Though they came from different backgrounds — a perfume’s formula read like gibberish to him, and so did a score to her — they had a shared sensibility, first as friends and then as artistic collaborators who exchanged ideas about music, color and emotion.
“Any form of art is about emotion,” Thibaudet said. “Whether it’s modern or not, if it makes you feel something, it elevates your soul.”
And that is what they sought to do by studying “Prometheus.” Scriabin is believed to have been synesthetic, seeing musical notes as colors, and with this work he brought together sight and sound. Laurent responded to those elements with three corresponding scents that trace an arc from a world before fire to one irreversibly changed by it.
Describing a perfume is a lot like describing music: You have to resort to metaphorical language. And so when Laurent spoke about the chaotic scent of the world before fire, she didn’t list ingredients but used words like “cold,” “anxious” and “dangerous.”
“I think that when you smell the fragrance, you feel naked in nature, and you have the feeling that you have to survive,” Laurent said. “Without fire, nature is difficult to survive because it’s cold and it’s violent. But I also have to make it bearable, because it’s really important that we create the sensation of chaos, which is really a style, but not disturb people or make them feeling like we are poisoning them.”
“It’s exactly,” she added, “what I think Scriabin was trying to do with this music.”
“PROMETHEUS” PERFORMANCES are already rare, and even rarer is one that aims for synesthetic experience. Often, the score stands alone. When colors are added, it is almost always through lighting design. Salonen has conducted the piece twice before: once without added effects, and once in what he described as “a sort of disco” production that he found too coarse for the music.
One day, he received a dinner invitation from Thibaudet, who pitched his and Laurent’s ideas for “Prometheus.” Salonen quickly realized that Laurent’s ideas weren’t just a gimmick — indeed, that they were “serious business,” he said — and decided to “hop on the train, because it seemed to be a good one to hop on.”
Salonen is prone to this kind of hopping as one of the most technologically curious conductors today. He turned Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” into a video and sound installation that embedded audience members throughout the orchestra; has experimented with virtual reality; and, a decade ago, starred in an Apple ad campaign that showed how thoroughly entwined the iPad, then still young, was with his work. By the time Apple released its Vision Pro early this month, he had already tried it and was beginning to think about how to apply it to classical music.
He has also embraced the use of video projections in concerts, which can be divisive. When the eye is focused on a screen, it is not focused on the orchestra, and vice versa. Works that incorporate visual elements inevitably result in a competition of the senses.
“Prometheus” is different. Salonen described it as “a collaboration of senses” that Laurent said was rooted in science. Through the neurological research she has tracked over the years, she has learned that scent and sight activate different regions of the brain. “Olfaction goes directly to amygdala and hippocampus, and it is not going to cortex,” she said. “It is not going to the reason. It is going just to the gut, the fear, the instinct, and also to the memory.”
The trick, at Davies Hall in October, was to get the senses activated at the same time. The engineers that Laurent worked with, Yves Cotarmanac’h and Yvan Regeard of Agence Desind, developed the vortexes, which disperse the fragrances with theatrical flair, and the diffusers, which accomplish much of the same without being seen. The scents are non-aerosol, meaning dry, so that they won’t linger or bleed into one another.
That morning, after Arnaud Buronfosse, the compliance and technical director of Cartier perfumes, inspected the scents, Laurent entered the auditorium with the vortexes — which had been flown in from France, where they will return in March — giving extremely precise directions about where they were placed and how they were positioned. The cannon fires worked immediately, but the diffusers required the extra test.
While the engineers worked on them, there were other elements to refine. Salonen questioned whether the performance should begin in darkness, which intrigued Laurent. “When you don’t have your eyes,” she told him, “you smell and hear more.”
Eventually, everyone was told to return to their seats for the second test. If the diffusers were going to work, it had to be then, because they had only two and a half hours of battery life. The lights dimmed; Laurent’s face was illuminated from her iPad below. Through speakers, the Berlin Philharmonic began to play.
As the score unfolded — the strings shivering, the winds twisting and unstable, the piano violently crashing — a scent arose from the seats, a bit like cold, wet stone. Laurent held her nose up, and exchanged smiles with her team from Cartier. When the music stopped, everyone applauded. Salonen turned to Laurent and exclaimed, “It worked!”
“Yes,” she responded with a relieved smile.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/23/arts ... rtier.html
