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Fabio Luisi, Perfume Maker!

We have had Mozart chocolates. We've had Melba toast. We have even had Yefim Bronfman wine.

Now, we have Fabio Luisi perfume.

Who knew that James Levine's heir apparent at the Metropolitan Opera was so versatile? Some people did, clearly, as on the FL Parfums website Maestro Luisi writes about his longstanding "secret passion" for creating perfumes. He has done this for friends over several years and now finds himself longing for a larger audience--in other words, time to move from chamber venues to symphony halls, as it were.

Luisi uses natural ingredients, which he also lists on the site--including Ethiopian myrrh, Kiwi ambergris and frankincense from Ethiopia. "Music," he writes, "like the art of creating perfume, is an art of blending--blending sounds in music, blending aromatic substances in perfumery."

One wonders whether the two worlds will ever explicitly cross. There was a famous production of Prokofiev's The Love of Three Oranges at English National Opera in the 1980s, where the audience were given scratch-n'-sniff cards to accompany the action at various key points. This might work for Luisi. Perhaps one of the more fragrant Strauss operas?

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