“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. 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. In many ways, Luisi could have been sent straight from a casting company. The wire-rimmed glasses, the wavy silver hair. The romantic arpeggio of his name, Fabio Luisi. He has an air about him so debonair, I half-expected him to arrive at our 10am interview in a tuxedo and bow tie. He wore a burgundy jacket with a black polo shirt buttoned to the top. Every conductor has a signature, though. Luisi conducts without a baton, his body lifting and lilting as he coaxes sounds from the orchestra that, according to concertmaster Alexander Kerr, are “warmer, less angular” than those of previous iterations of the DSO. Then there are the perfumes. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Fabio Luisi (@fabioluisiconductor) “The passion of perfume has always been there,” Luisi says. “Every smell, even the most unpleasant ones, has something interesting. You want to know, what is inside?” A native of Genoa, Italy, Luisi began piano lessons at age three. By 13, he was immersed in the classical music he bought from discount album bins. Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Shostakovich, did not matter. If it was on sale, he bought it. His parents gave him some money each week for hobbies, and much was spent on music, but a fair bit was spent on perfume. His first purchase was Aramis, a masculine fragrance by Estée Lauder that was famous by the time the adolescent Luisi slid his money across the counter in the 1970s. Next, he bought Guerlain Vetiver and Caron. He did not often wear the perfumes; his parents did not like their son leaving the house in a cloud of sandalwood, patchouli and leather. “They told me not-very-nice things about how I smelled,” he says with a laugh. “I prefer not to say, but you can imagine.” By his late teens, piano dominated his life. He played accompaniment with singers, which led to playing accompaniment for operas, which led to conducting. He studied under Croatian conductor Milan Horvat at a conservatory in Graz, Austria. By the 1990s, he had become artistic director of the Graz Symphony Orchestra. Over the next years, he kept leapfrogging. Posts in Vienna, Leipzig, Geneva, Dresden. It was in 2012 in New York that his perfume study began in earnest. At the time, he was principal conductor for the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Eager to hone another part of his palate, he connected with the chief perfumer of Guerlain in Paris, who introduced him to “perfume whisperer” Ron Winnegrad. The creator of such iconic scents as Love’s Baby Soft and Lagerfeld Classic, Winnegrad was, by that time, running New York’s International Flavors & Fragrances, Inc. “He told me, come every week, and we can smell together,” Luisi recalls. This was his education. Luisi claims not to have any special in-born powers of smell. His wife’s nose is better than his. He cultivated it, though, reading books like Perfumes: The Guide, an anthology of wisdom by husband-and-wife team Luca Turin, a biologist, and Tania Sanchez, a perfume critic. And just like fragrances or particular brands – “You can like them or not like them,” says the conductor – classical music can also be subjective, depending on people’s taste. Rachmaninoff, Wagner, you can like them, or not like them, but an orchestra’s job is to realise the composition’s essence. When Luisi announced last year that the Dallas Symphony Orchestra would be mounting Wagner’s Ring Cycle in its entirety, not everyone was thrilled. Kerr, the concertmaster, had said he had always considered the Ring Cycle “pompous and anciently nationalistic”, but after performing the 16-hour series, the experience ranks among the best in his long career. “I wouldn’t have traded it for anything,” he says. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Mezzo (@mezzo.tv) Our tastes are not simply a matter of first impression. Love – in music, in fragrance, in life – can evolve. As we stroll around The Scent Room, a high-end perfumery in the West Village, Luisi points to a bottle of Maison Crivelli, a haute perfumery whose scents are inspired by the exotic experiences of its globe-trotting founder, at least according to the website. “I have this one,” he says, plucking out an oud. Does oud mean wood? “It is actually a kind of agarwood, and the moment when it rots, they extract the resin.” Not everyone appreciates how esoteric the origin of perfume ingredients is. Ambergris is secretion from the sperm whale. Musk is secretion from the musk deer, now illegal in most countries owing to animal-cruelty laws – synthetic musk is used instead. “Oud is very expensive to buy,” says Luisi, adding that he gets his from a producer in Indonesia. While testing the scent, he says, eyes closed: “Coumarin, which is in a tonka bean. I’m sure we have sandalwood inside, but also cedarwood.” Luisi’s skill is remarkable. Later, when asked whether he was perplexed by Luisi’s hobby, Kerr said he was not. “If you think of opera, there are so many things going on at once,” he says. The singers, the orchestra, the drama on stage. “Maybe someone who can parse those individual things can also parse out the elements that make anything whole.” According to Kerr, Mozart wrote music while bowling. Beethoven was deaf when he composed his Grosse Fuge. The greats do not rely on one sense, but perhaps all of them. Or maybe genius is a sense all its own. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Dallas Symphony Orchestra (@dallassymphony) “Oh!” Luisi says, after we had been in The Scent Room half an hour. He is looking at a series of small bottles on a table near the entryway. “You have my perfumes.” Luisi has his own line of fragrances, FL Parfums, sold at the DSO’s gift shop, on his website, as well as at The Scent Room. Someone had placed the testers in the centre of the room. “This is what I consider my signature,” he says, spritzing the thin white strip and handing it to me. “Eclectique number two. It’s number two because number one was a mess.” It smells dark, not floral or fruity … like coffee, perhaps? “There is no coffee inside,” Luisi says flatly. He explains I am smelling bitterness. The ingredients are coumarin, pepper, sandalwood, vetiver, a tiny bit of patchouli. View this post on Instagram A post shared by FL Parfums (@flparfums) I had worried Luisi would be bored by a perfume shop. Instead, he was entranced. Long after our photographer left, he kept studying potions on the wall and sharing his assessments. Vilhelm, very good. Montale, very good. I felt like I was glimpsing 13-year-old Luisi, the precocious aesthete proudly buying his first bottle of Aramis. Sound and smell are twinned, Luisi explains, because they hit the limbic system, bypassing the rationality of the brain and reaching what is known as the emotional nervous system, the part of us that feels rather than thinks. “That’s why if you smell something, immediately a memory pops up,” he says, his hand bursting open to demonstrate. “Same with music. You hear a melody, and you think, where did I hear this?” For days after meeting the conductor, the hem of my jacket smelled of the Maison Crivelli oud, which got lighter and more intoxicating as it faded, and each time I sniffed it, I thought of Fabio Luisi. Sarah Hepola