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A maestro of sound and scents, Fabio Luisi breaks music and perfume down to their essence

Dallas Symphony Orchestra music director describes his love for perfumery as well as how music and fragrance can evoke the same emotions

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Fabio Luisi, music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. He explains his lifelong love for perfumery as well as how music and fragrance can evoke the same emotions. Photo: FL Parfums
Tribune News Service

“I smell a little bit of the Starbucks over there,” says Fabio Luisi, music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (DSO), as we sat on a bench in the West Village shopping centre in the city in the US state of Texas. It is a brisk February morning, and Luisi – whose fine-tuned nose is as sharp as his ear – is being put to the test.

The coffee shop is about 50 yards (45 metres) away, but then we both notice a woman sitting on a nearby bench. She is drinking iced coffee.

“Ah yes,” Luisi says, in his light European accent. “It is her.”

A conductor is a wizard of sound, summoning harmony and drama from notes on a page. As the DSO’s music director for the past five years, the 66-year-old Luisi has led the orchestra through world premieres and epic sonic journeys, like the four-part Ring Cycle, a series of Germanic operas by composer Richard Wagner so long and arduous that few, if any, orchestras in the 21st century have dared it in its entirety.
Fabio Luisi conducts the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in Dallas in 2022. Photo: TNS
Fabio Luisi conducts the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in Dallas in 2022. Photo: TNS
Luisi is also a wizard of smell. He is a perfumer who makes his own line of bespoke scents in a laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland, the home he does not live in much.

The fate of a maestro like Luisi, who won a 2013 Grammy for leading New York’s Metropolitan Opera in the last two operas of the Ring Cycle, is to be forever in demand. He is also the principal conductor of orchestras in Tokyo in Japan and Denmark in addition to Dallas.

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