Piece Comment

Review of Mozart's Hidden Kitchen & The Tables of New Crowned Hope


In this funny, offbeat celebration produced one day before Mozart's 251st birthday, the Kitchen Sisters take us to Vienna for the New Crowned Hope Festival. Wolfgang meets Weisswurst and a dozen other delicacies as restaurateur Alice Waters all but croons about sustainable tables at Chez Panisse and director Peter Sellars drones about how agriculture and culture come together. At times the piece seems to get out of hand as when, say, a "dinner lady" who used to prepare food at a school in Nottinghamshire recalls serving her students such gag-me-with-a-spoon dishes as "turkey twizzler," "chicken teddies," and "pork hippo" -- "the stench was dreadful." But if the eccentricities of the festival participants sometimes go "over the top," the dulcet tones of Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and the slow movement of his 21st Piano Concerto in the background bring everything into transcendent focus. If music be the food of love, play on!