The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s programs for the first two weeks of April are organized under the title “Music for the Senses”, featuring composers for whom color is paramount and who even synasthesiastically associate specific harmonies with specific colors. In the case of Anne Clyne’s Color Field (2020), which opened Saturday night’s program, a specific work of art – Mark Rothko’s 1960 Orange, Red, Yellow – was a source of inspiration while Scriabin’s association of certain pitches with certain hues provided the tonal center of each of the three parts of her piece: D-Yellow, C-Red, G-Orange. Those colors were projected onto the organ pipes and along the side walls of the second balcony as each section played out. Reversing Rothko’s order allowed Clyne to blend the music of the preceding two color panels just as those colors blend to create orange. Sun-dappled and idyllic, Yellow shone brightly; Red was driving, percussive and demonic, and Orange gradually combined qualities of the other two, warming then fading out to the tolling of bells.
Andris Nelsons took an expansive approach to the beginning of Wagner's Prelude and Liebestod, highlighting the contrasting colors of the woodwinds. The opening rests were noticeably longer, creating an unusual sense of tension and anticipation. When the strings finally swelled and surged, the tempo accelerated and the waves of sound were charged with passion and yearning. The Liebestod sang in one long breath rising hushed, then ever more ecstatically before sighing its last.
Karl Muck led the BSO’s first and only previous performances of Liszt’s Prometheus in 1917, inexplicable given the powerful impression this belated revival made. It is just as vivid an example of dramatic scene painting as any of the more popular symphonic poems, as Nelsons and the players proved with a stirring, performance.
Lighting technology was not equal to Scriabin’s vision for Prometheus, Poem of Fire, though attempts were made to realize it after Serge Koussevitzky led the 1911 world premiere in Moscow without the projected colors. John Mauceri led the Yale Symphony in the first comprehensive attempt in 1969, employing cutting-edge laser technology. Thirty-one years later Scriabin scholar and Yale doctoral candidate Anne Gawboy collaborated with lighting designer Justin Townsend and, once again, the Yale Symphony to perform the Poem using LED lighting. They revisited their concept at Symphony Hall, installing four lighting arrays, two suspended above the stage and two above the hall. A disk with twelve radiating spokes dominated the back of the stage. Colors were projected onto the disk and organ pipes, coursing and pulsing through the spokes. The lights in the hall illuminated the ceiling and the side walls of the second balcony and, at times, the audience below. Even the tiers of the chandeliers and the lights outlining the clerestory windows were enlisted. Anyone passing outside might well have thought Dr Frankenstein had taken up residence.
What the lights added or detracted likely differed from listener to listener. Most people seemed to focus on the stage. Some like myself often turned their attention to the arrays themselves and became intermittently absorbed in the “how to” of it all. Perhaps Scriabin’s vision will only be most fully realized when technology can produce light without us seeing or knowing where it comes from, eliminating any potential distraction.
Without skilled leadership, the Poem of Fire can easily become turgid and bombastic. Nelsons’ colorful, carefully calibrated performance avoided that pitfall but could have leaned even more into score’s wilder aspects. Also, Yefim Bronfman’s limpid playing was occasionally overwhelmed and barely audible. After so much dissonance, the monolithic triple forte finale with orchestra and chorus in full cry in a blaze of light was literally uplifting.
