music in colour Sun 30 Mar 2014 7.30pm Scriabin Symphony No 1 Liszt Piano Concerto No 2 Scriabin Symphony No 4 (‘The Poem of Ecstasy’)
We often attach descriptions of music to colour or programmatic stories, but what if, when listening to music, you actually saw or felt real colour from sound? And what if that colour wasn’t conjured up by your imagination, but by a real extra-musical sense? For synaesthetes, this is exactly what might happen, and the brain’s ability to connect the senses – whether sound as colour, taste as a shape, smell as sound – has long been observed. Synaesthesia is a condition that occurs when an individual receives a stimulus that in one sense is simultaneously experienced as a sensation in another, but it can differ vastly between all those with the condition and is more prevalent than you might think. Some famous synaesthetes of the 20th century include both Scriabin and Messiaen, the focus of Valery Gergiev’s spring season with the LSO, and musicians such as Leonard Bernstein (former President of the LSO), jazz composer Duke Ellington, and singer/songwriters Stevie Wonder and Billy Joel. For both Scriabin and Messiaen – like many with this marriage of the senses – sound and colour were inextricably linked, however, their perception of that marriage is completely different. Whilst Scriabin perceived keys as certain colours, Messiaen linked sequences of well-defined colours with particular modes (types of scales that he’d defined himself). Scriabin took this to its most obvious conclusion in 1910 with his fifth symphony, ‘Prometheus, Poem of Fire’. Running through the score is an optional orchestral part for ‘colour-organ’ or ‘light-keyboard’ – a machine linked to an array of coloured lights to give the audience an experience of what Scriabin could sense. He even attempted to make his own instrument to play this part. He actually prefaces the score with a colour/key wheel, dictating exactly which key matches which colour.
Messiaen’s exploration of his condition is much more subtle. Whilst colour was completely central to Messiaen’s music (he didn’t believe in terms like ‘tonal’ or ‘modal’ – for him there was only music with or without colour) it didn’t make its way into his compositions quite as literally as Scriabin’s. Messiaen’s scores were instead dotted with the occasional note for the conductor, an indication as to how the conductor might interpret a passage rather than being a colour that the audience might perceive. They range from simple descriptions like ‘gold and brown’, to the much more vividly-detailed ‘blue-violet rocks, speckled with little grey cubes, cobalt blue, deep Prussian blue, highlighted by a bit of violet purple, gold, red, ruby, and stars of mauve, black and white’. Synaesthete yourself or not, Scriabin’s symphonies take us on a vastly contrasting musical journey. From his first romantic works (likened to Chopin), to his more impressionist middle pieces, to his much more psychedelic late works; his brief career (he died very young, aged 43) chartered many a pioneering change. His synaesthesia came to realise itself more and more as not just a marriage of the senses, but as a unification of arts. He had planned a vast work for many different performers – Mysterium – which he hailed as a ‘religious synthesis of all arts which would herald the birth of a new world’ to be performed in the Himalayas, but did not live to fulfil this creationist vision.
Valery Gergiev conductor Denis Matsuev piano London Symphony Chorus Thu 3 Apr 2014 1pm, LSO St Luke’s BBC Radio 3
LuNchtime Concert Scriabin Sonatas Nos 5 & 9 plus works by Shostakovich and Rachmaninov Yevgeny Sudbin piano Thu 10 Apr 2014 1pm, LSO St Luke’s BBC Radio 3
LuNchtime Concert Scriabin Sonata No 3 plus works by Rachmaninov and Prokofiev Boris Giltburg piano Thu 10 Apr 2014 7.30pm Messiaen L’ascension Scriabin Symphony No 5 (‘Prometheus, Poem of Fire’) Scriabin Symphony No 2 Valery Gergiev conductor Denis Matsuev piano London Symphony Chorus Supported by LSO Patrons
Sun 13 Apr 2014 7.30pm Messiaen Les offrandes oubliées Chopin Piano Concerto No 2 Scriabin Symphony No 3 (‘The Divine Poem’) Valery Gergiev conductor Daniil Trifonov piano Fri 24 Jan, 21 Feb, 7 & 21 Mar 2014 12.30pm LSO St Luke’s
DISCOVER MORE Watch a video … Visit bit.ly/musicincolour to watch a YouTube video on synaesthesia Read more … Interested in Scriabin and his synaesthesia? Read Faubion Bowers’ The New Scriabin – Enigma and Answers
DISCOVER MORE
LSO Discovery Lunchtime Concerts Spring 2014: Music in colour Supported by LSO Patrons
ON TOUR Tue 1 to Thu 8 Apr 2014 Brussels – Frankfurt – Dortmund – Freiburg – Paris – Milan – Turin
Mode 2–2
Mode 6–2
Messiaen, Chopin, Scriabin & Liszt with Valery Gergiev, Denis Matsuev & Daniil Trifinov
full programme and soloist details on pages 38 to 43
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