Performances at Yale shine light on 'piano-theater

Two years ago Woolsey Hall was briefly transformed by a vibrant, multicolored music and light show of Alexander Scriabin’s “Prometheus, Poem of Fire.” On Feb. 9–11, Yale will again pay homage to the Russian composer and the multimedia art form he created by matching musical notes to dazzling bursts of color.

On Thursday, Feb. 9, the Yale Theater Studies Program and the Whitney Humanities Center (WHC) will co-host a colloquium on the increasingly popular performance genre “piano-theater,” which was partly spawned by the pioneering multimedia composer.

The colloquium will feature a public forum with Georgian pianist Eteri Andjaparidze and lighting designer Jennifer Tipton, who will demonstrate “piano theater” in a performance of excerpts from Scriabin works for the “clavier à lumière” (literally, “light piano”), an instrument that projects different colored lights as it is played. The color-coded keyboard instrument, which was invented by Scriabin, exemplifies the composer’s theories of synesthesia — that a single sensory stimulus, such as hearing music, produces a simultaneous perception by another sense, such as seeing color.

As part of the performance, Andiaparidze and Tipton will elucidate how Scriabin’s mystical theories informed his music. Free and open to the public, the event takes place 4:30–6 p.m. in the auditorium of the WHC, 53 Wall St.

Following the colloquium, there will be a screening of a documentary about the 2010 Woolsey Hall production of “Prometheus — Poem of Fire,” reprising the light show and musical performance by the Yale Symphony Orchestra. The screening, in WHC at 6:30 p.m., is also free and open to the public.

On Friday and Saturday, February 10 and 11, Andiparidze and Tipton will give a full performance of music for the clavier a lumière at 8 p.m.
in the University Theatre, 222 York St.

The internationally acclaimed pianist and MacArthur Award recipient Tipton will perform excerpts from Scriabin’s Poème Languide in B Major and other works, including Feuillet d’Album in F-sharp Major, opus posthumous. There will be a question-and-answer session with the performers immediately following both performances.

Tickets for the performances are $35, $25 for Yale employees and $10 for students.

The concerts are part of the No Boundaries Project, a series of global performances sponsored by the Yale Repertory Theater and the World Performance Project at Yale.