The sweet smell of success?
The Sydney Conservatorium of Music will hope so, as they add a new dimension to a new opera production--the sensation of smell.
Our friends over at Limelight magazine in Australia report that this month's production of Hymn to the Sun--an adaptation of Philip Glass's 1983 opera Akhnaten, about the Egyptian pharaoh--will waft perfume into the audience.
Sensuality is apparently the goal, with the perfume designed by Chiaki Nomura (who's based in New York). And, says Limelight, the idea is for the scent to "connect audiences more deeply with the events as they unfold on stage."
The perfume has tones of velvet jasmine, water lilies, deep music, bergamot and muguet, and you have one chance to catch it--at the single performance on Saturday, July 27.
This might sound entirely novel, but in fact there have been other instances, although rare, where smell was brought to bear.
Way back in 1988, the director Richard Jones took on Prokofiev's The Love of Three Oranges for English National Opera--and duly supplied the audience with scratch 'n' sniff cards so that they could unleash the appropriate scents. The show was a hit, but smell-o-vision didn't catch on in a wider sense.
Maybe the Australians will now revive a lost art.
And for future productions? Here are Classicalite's suggestions for appropriate scents...
Britten's Peter Grimes
Fish. Dead fish.
Bizet's Carmen
Tapas and wine.
Bernstein's Candide
Optimism (the precise make-up of said scent is obviously for the scent designer to work out, but this one should be intersting).
Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen
Wet fox fur.
Marschner's Der Vampyr
Garlic, and lots of it!
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