Elina Akselrud in Graz

You can see, feel and smell this music

Elina Akselrud

(Bild: Vladimir Gramagin)

Can you actually see, feel and smell music? Pianist Elina Akselrud has been exploring this question for some time. At the Mumuth in Graz, she has now added meaningful facets to Scriabin's late piano sonatas.

Can you see, feel and smell music? Pianist and doctoral student at Graz University of the Arts Elina Akselrud has long devoted her artistic research to the interweaving of aesthetic experience. Together with her collective "Intertwining Arts", the late piano sonatas no. 6 to 10 by Alexander Scriabin were now the starting point for this special interdisciplinary work.

Even fragrant fog is part of the concert
In concrete terms, this meant on the concert evening: Akselrud played Scriabin, dancer Lea Oroz partially improvised incredible movements in stage constructions by Yunnai Zhang, who shared the lighting direction via sensors with the collective Ninja Guru Studio and the occasion-related fragrance compositions by Naoko Kusunoki were diffused in the room mist.

While the artistic disciplines complement each other in other genres such as music theater, they are conceptually intertwined and interdependent in this approach: movement becomes audible, light can be smelled, etc. The result is an artistic amalgam that detaches Scriabin's work from the performers in the spirit of the composer. Art stands here as a monolithic giant in its own right, woven into the strings of the piano.