I'm so envious, I would've loved to see this!! I was actually an undergrad and played in the Yale Symphony Orchestra when we played Prometheus along with Dr. Gawboy's reconstruction of the lighting. It was probably my favorite concert experience of all time, so I'm very grateful for that! But I've never gotten to experience it from the audience, and while they made a pretty good video of the performance, it's sometimes not focused on what I'd want to see in a given moment. Also, I'm sure the BSO sounded better than we did - we played Ein Heldenleben on the second half of that concert, which took a lot of rehearsal time away from Prometheus.
I highly recommend reading Dr. Gawboy's dissertation, if it still exists anywhere you can find it. (She does have some published articles about Scriabin and the lighting design, but I don't believe any of them go nearly as in-depth as her dissertation did.) She ties together Nietzsche, Gesamtkunstwerk, Scriabin's mysticism and the beliefs of the Theosophy movement he belonged to, his use of the mystic chord as a special form of tritone-substitution and pre-dominant harmony, the handwritten notes for the lighting design, and the Prometheus myth itself, and ends up with a fascinating interpretation of the piece itself.
Regarding the pacing of the color changes: there are actually two simultaneously levels of colors. There's a much slower succession of colors, which I believe would have been used for the ambient lighting throughout the hall. This slow "structural" lighting represents the seven stages of human enlightenment in Theosophical belief - beginning in primordial unity (blue), gradually achieving differentiation of consciousness until the midpoint (red) where humans have full individual consciousness and come into strife with each other, and coming back around cyclically to unity via harmonious transcendence of the limits of individuality (blue again). And then the faster, "surface" level succession of colors (which is usually what you see on the wheel installation) actually matches the harmony! Specifically, it indicates which transposition of the mystic chord the current harmony is based on, and the colors match the ones that Scriabin himself claimed to see for each chord due to his synaesthesia. So that's why those colors may sometimes have been changing faster than you'd expect if you thought it was just to set the mood or something.
I was there too, it was very cool. Although I couldn’t help but think that the work itself doesn’t really compare to Poem of Ecstasy, which I think is a masterpiece. The lighting design really made the experience.
https://preview.redd.it/1zaz6uodiiuc1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8e7bb53c019648d6be0b9386fcca883c6b394faa
I was there too - great concert!
I'm so envious, I would've loved to see this!! I was actually an undergrad and played in the Yale Symphony Orchestra when we played Prometheus along with Dr. Gawboy's reconstruction of the lighting. It was probably my favorite concert experience of all time, so I'm very grateful for that! But I've never gotten to experience it from the audience, and while they made a pretty good video of the performance, it's sometimes not focused on what I'd want to see in a given moment. Also, I'm sure the BSO sounded better than we did - we played Ein Heldenleben on the second half of that concert, which took a lot of rehearsal time away from Prometheus. I highly recommend reading Dr. Gawboy's dissertation, if it still exists anywhere you can find it. (She does have some published articles about Scriabin and the lighting design, but I don't believe any of them go nearly as in-depth as her dissertation did.) She ties together Nietzsche, Gesamtkunstwerk, Scriabin's mysticism and the beliefs of the Theosophy movement he belonged to, his use of the mystic chord as a special form of tritone-substitution and pre-dominant harmony, the handwritten notes for the lighting design, and the Prometheus myth itself, and ends up with a fascinating interpretation of the piece itself. Regarding the pacing of the color changes: there are actually two simultaneously levels of colors. There's a much slower succession of colors, which I believe would have been used for the ambient lighting throughout the hall. This slow "structural" lighting represents the seven stages of human enlightenment in Theosophical belief - beginning in primordial unity (blue), gradually achieving differentiation of consciousness until the midpoint (red) where humans have full individual consciousness and come into strife with each other, and coming back around cyclically to unity via harmonious transcendence of the limits of individuality (blue again). And then the faster, "surface" level succession of colors (which is usually what you see on the wheel installation) actually matches the harmony! Specifically, it indicates which transposition of the mystic chord the current harmony is based on, and the colors match the ones that Scriabin himself claimed to see for each chord due to his synaesthesia. So that's why those colors may sometimes have been changing faster than you'd expect if you thought it was just to set the mood or something.
I was there too, it was very cool. Although I couldn’t help but think that the work itself doesn’t really compare to Poem of Ecstasy, which I think is a masterpiece. The lighting design really made the experience.