Adelaide Fringe. Masonic - Foyer at Gluttony. 5 Mar 2019
Pitchfork is a multisensory experience. It’s about music and food.
It’s a concert like no other. It’s a complete tease. It teases you with excerpts (usually complete movements) from major works from the string quartet repertoire – some well-known, others not so. You want to hear more but there’s no time – it’s onto the next piece.
The food is sophisticated. The flavours and textures are gracious, but there is enough only for a taste. It’s also a tease. Like the music it draws you in. You know it’s good, and your body is inwardly screaming at you that it’s good, but then it’s gone all too quickly.
It doesn’t sound like fun, but it is. The magic is in the paring of the music with the food, the food with the music. The ying with the yang.
The audience is taken to their individual tables by a hostess and Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 3 ‘Mishima’, is playing in the background. Immediately, because of the choice of this particular piece of music, one senses the next sixty minutes are going to be sublime. Glass’s music is not for everyone, but when it accompanies ritual washing of hands with lemon scented hand-wash, it’s just perfect. It’s hypnotic and soothing, like the citrus perfumes.
Scarlatti was played to accompany orange blossom and butterfly pea-flowered iced tea. It borders on a geisha tea ceremony. It’s very Silk Road.
Then it’s ripe camembert cheese with balsamic glaze (applied with a paintbrush of course) while Ravel is gently played. It whisks one off to Montmartre, but just for a short while.
Melon balls dipped in tangy sherbet perfectly suit the effervescence of a Mendelssohn quartet, and Joe Chindamo’s quartet is ideally suited to a game of pass the parcel where every player wins a prize; a piece of fudge in many flavours of course.
David Paterson’s Quartettsätze is given a première performance and it is the highlight of the evening. Paterson is a pianist who specializes in chamber music and his quartet – well, at least the first movement - is stunning. It voices the cello and violins in an especially interesting way which gives an urgency to the melody line. More! We want more! Oh yes, and we are served emu bush tea and native lemon myrtle lamington bites, and we want more of these too. More! Delicious!
With the palate cleansed and taste buds excited it’s onto a slab of chilli chocolate with a spiky Shostakovich quartet urging us to smash the chocolate into bite sizes. How convenient that our hostess has supplied us with a mallet to do the job, and the four players of the Australian String Quartet do not so much as miss a beat or flinch a muscle as we lay into the job!
And to finish? What better than a serene Schubert quartet while we enjoy a deconstructed pav which is semi-chaotically drizzled and crumbled over a fresh plastic tablecloth ready for our eager fingers to scoop it up into our mouths. Such fun!
The ASQ is innovative. This event is proof conclusive.
The caterers, Post Dining, are also innovative. Their merging of food and the arts is inspiring.
The next time an event like this comes along, do NOT hesitate. There’s nothing quite like it.
Kym Clayton
When: Closed
Where: Masonic – Foyer at Gluttony
Bookings: Closed
