Immersion Versions

There was a time in 2022 when nobody in the arts community could escape the question: Have you seen the immersive Van Gogh exhibit? That experience spread around America’s offbeat warehouse scene like wildfire, lighting up walls with Van Gogh’s pale greens, yellows, and blues, accompanied by strains of Debussy and, occasionally, curated scents. The show grossed more than a quarter of a billion dollars and inspired numerous copycat exhibits.

The closest “classical” parallel might be the Candlelight concerts by the entertainment company Fever that have swept through cities around the world, where string quartets and pianists play Vivaldi and Coldplay and the like in pop-up venues surrounded by a highly Instragrammable ambiance of several hundred fake candles, violins being rather flammable, after all.

Symphony orchestras, too, have been increasingly experimenting with “immersive” experiences, broadly defined, though their goals tend to be loftier than mere profit. “I saw the Van Gogh. I liked it! It was fun. The problem with that is that you do it once, like a ride at Universal,” says French conductor Stéphane Denève, music director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and artistic director of New World Symphony. “Our goal is to tame those kinds of experiences to make them much more subtle and much more ambiguous and much more valuable, artistically,” Denève continues. “It just requires a new type of artist, a new type of taste, a new type of experience.”

Instead of dressing visual art with music, orchestras are exploring multiple ways to perform new and canonic concert music using streaming technology, projecting paintings and videos, and other elements to accompany works by living composers like John Adams and Anna Clyne to simulate a sort of aesthetic synesthesia. (Wagner himself, the champion of “total art,” would have been thrilled by the versatility of today’s digital projections and surround-sound amplification.) Orchestras are also experimenting with new ways to seat listeners so that they are fully enveloped by the sound of the orchestra, surrounding audiences with musicians in auditorium spaces for performances of Beethoven or inviting listeners to sit onstage next to the players for an up-close experience.

Water Works
While some orchestras are ornamenting and adorning historical music with immersive visuals, as the New World Symphony Orchestra did with Debussy’s La mer—water-themed pieces are notably common—and Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, many are commissioning new works or turning to more recent compositions to build immersive experiences. The Charlotte Symphony Orchestra in February partnered with the Blumenthal Arts complex to create an immersive experience built on composer John Luther Adams’s 2013 Become Ocean, the Pulitzer Prize-winning, tectonic work that crests and falls over the course of 42 minutes. (The work was commissioned and premiered by the Seattle Symphony).

“We put lighting on the audience to make you feel like you were underwater, with a ripple effect and a lot of coordinated color changes,” says Scott Freck, the Charlotte Symphony’s vice president of artistic operations and general manager. He explains that the projections were meant to be more interpretive than descriptive. “We didn’t want to have it bend towards narrative, that we were trying to tell the story of a population of a particular kind of marine mammal or something,” Freck says. “We wanted to have people have the opportunity to listen to music, be surrounded by the visuals, and decide for this, for themselves, what it meant, if anything.”

Listeners were greeted with ambient ocean sounds in the lobby, undulating lighting, and a projected seagull circling in different patterns. In the hall, the sound of the orchestra was digitally amplified so that it seemed to emerge from all corners, fully enveloping attendees with both acoustic and amplified sound. “I’ve been at this a while, and I found it powerful. Sitting out in the audience, I could feel my breathing slow,” says Freck. “I could feel a sense of contemplation come over me.” The project was a one-off, for now, made possible through special fundraising as the orchestra sought to keep tickets at an affordable $35.

The Orchestra of St. Luke’s in New York City dressed up an anniversary performance with special lighting by the renowned lighting designer Jennifer Tipton, who won a MacArthur “Genius” Grant for her groundbreaking work in theater, dance, and installation art. “Some of her best lighting, you almost don’t even notice,” says James Roe, the orchestra’s president and executive director. “The idea is to help guide the listener through these various elements which will be both visual and aural and spatial.” That concert, co-produced with Baryshnikov Arts, included Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, with ambient nature sounds beckoning listeners into the space stitching the experience together between pieces. The concert also featured a pair of newer works, Angélica Negrón’s Marejada and Anna Clyne’s Woman Holding a Balance.

Clyne, who is also a visual artist, premiered PALETTE at the New World Symphony, with projections of paintings she created specially to pair with the music as well as some electronic amplification and adjustment of specific instruments. “Composers [in the past] wrote for new instruments as they were added to the orchestra, now we’re adding electronics as they’re becoming more available,” Clyne says.

“I went into this project being very flexible, because different halls have different resources and different budgets,” she adds, noting that she intends to explore adding fragrances to her music in future works. The San Francisco Symphony, which added scent cannons with fragrances by Mathilde Laurent and Cartier to a performance of Scriabin’s Prometheus in 2024, has a special space for immersive SoundBox concerts, which transform each performance to envelop attendees with different lighting and extras and sound. “Immersives are tricky. It is about finding that balance between visuals that are additive,” says Gregory Hix, the San Francisco Symphony’s associate director of artistic planning. “If they’re a distraction or if they’re taking away from the music in any way, then why are we including them?”

Inside the Sound
During the pandemic, the Curtis Institute of Music filmed a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade tone poem with 26 cameras and crafted an installation for listeners to wander through. Live musicians could join in as well. “In several of the sessions, it was like, you know, Curtis symphony orchestra students plus 15 youth orchestra students sitting at stands with them in the room,” says Vince Ford, senior vice president of digital strategy and innovation at Curtis. “You could kind of make your own adventure out of it, and it allowed the audience to become a part of the story. You get to go inside of the performance and kind of find your way through it.” Curtis also included real-time program notes to help orient listeners. The project has toured since its creation, and Ford says that its popularity could mean a reprise with a similar project in the future.

Conductor David Bernard is a fierce proponent of surrounding listeners with musicians to allow them to experience the music from inside the orchestra. He views the opportunity as an important way for orchestras to connect with new listeners: “I would spend $200 to hear the Berlin Philharmonic playing Mahler’s Ninth in Carnegie Hall, and this other guy about 10 feet away from me, that would be the last thing he would ever want to do. And it dawns on me what the difference is: The difference is that I, along with pretty much every other classical music enthusiast, had what I call an ‘inside out’ experience at some point in their lives.” Maybe it was singing in a chorus or playing in a youth symphony or band, but Bernard has toured his “Inside/Out” concept at other orchestras after developing the experience at the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony in New York City. The experience works best in a large room that doesn’t have columns, and ideally one that has an option for acoustic enhancement so that listeners can hear a blended orchestral sound in addition to the instruments they’re sitting near.

The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, meanwhile, launched a concept it calls “PSO360” in 2017, where about 200 listeners sit on the stage of Heinz Hall for an up-close, intimate chamber experience. “You see every motion, you feel the vibrations,” says Mary Persin, the orchestra’s vice president of artistic planning. “You feel the cello sound and vibrations as they pull their bow across the string. It’s almost like taking a microscope or magnification, and you’re intensifying all of those elements that are at play in every concert.” The orchestra’s typical classical subscription concert weekend is Friday through Sunday, and the orchestra only performs its subscription program on a handful of Saturday nights. PSO360, which generally always sells out, is a way to activate the orchestra on some of those formerly dark Saturdays, with the weekend’s soloist headlining the PSO360 concerts.

The economics of these experiences can take some getting used to orchestras. The overhead for all of the technological aspects of immersive events involving projections, crews, and sound can make them difficult for smaller orchestras to pull off. “You know, the Van Gogh exhibit typically runs like two to three months or something like that, and that’s not how orchestras work,” says Freck at the Charlotte Symphony. “To be plain, I think these will always depend on contributed funding to support the infrastructure that has to go into the theater space.”

Still, demand is high. Charlotte sold out all performances of its immersive Become Ocean. And audiences have become more accepting of pairing visuals with orchestral performances, due in part to the surge in popularity of live-with-film performances in the past decade and a half. “This is the next evolution of the classical concert, the next step in how people consume and enjoy classical music,” Freck says. “It’s a new art form, really, in the Wagnerian way, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2025 print issue of Symphony magazine.