Food Music
The proposal
Notes to savour: the pleasure of the table and of being together in a musical journey with a signature touch
The Food Music project sets out to explore, with amused curiosity, the intimate relationship between two elements that, over the centuries, have often been skilfully paired in moments of sociability: food and music. Drawing on repertoires of the most varied kinds – operetta, the minor genres, occasional arias, musical divertissements – a tasty soundtrack has been compiled that tells, with the help of the stave, of being in company, the pleasure of food, the seduction of ingredients, the harmony of flavours.
As in the case of Gioachino Rossini’s Mendiants, pieces dedicated to dried fruit and nuts, found in the fourth book of the great composer’s Péchés de vieillesse, and well known for his friendship with the French chef Antonin Carême and his own forays into the art of gastronomy (think of Tournedos Rossini!).
So too with manias and weaknesses, such as the semi-serious lament of the young Lischen, who cannot resist coffee in Bach’s celebrated secular aria, or the barely concealed tipsiness of La Périchole in the aria Ah! Quel dîner je viens de faire from Offenbach’s operetta of the same name. But the journey, rich in piquant surprises, also takes in the whimsical La Bonne Cuisine by Leonard Bernstein, an ironic and emphatic hymn to the poor man’s dish par excellence by Luigi Denza (Canzone della Polenta), and arrives at the elegant piano minimalism of the contemporary Japanese composer Akira Yuyama (Confections: a piano sweet).
Adding flavour to the evening’s musical programme is a distinguished and erudite bon vivant who, through quotations, anecdotes, curiosities and biographical notes, accompanies the audience in search of lost flavours and melodies. Not only those of food and gastronomy, but also the social and friendly ones that have always characterised the convivial table and the pleasures of being together.
Performers
Elena Caccamo
CantanteVoiceBorn in Milan in 1994, the mezzo-soprano Elena Caccamo combines the operatic tradition with a strong vocation for contemporary and twentieth-century music. Her early artistic training began in the Children’s Chorus of the Teatro…
Christian Schmitz
MusicianPianoBorn in Milan, he graduated in piano from the Conservatoire of his home city under Maestro Sergio Lattes. He then furthered his studies with Maestro Boris Petrushansky, Prof. Nelly Ben-Or and Prof. Maria Luisa Franco, graduating…