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Before they ever shared a stage, James Beard media award-winning cookbook author J. Kenji López-Alt and violinist James Ehnes had already discovered a mutual obsession with the art of cooking and Beethoven string quartets.
López-Alt later teamed up with Ehnes — who also serves as artistic director of Seattle Chamber Music Society — to devise an unusual format combining live performance, onstage cooking and guided conversation of the craft involved in both disciplines.
Their concept, involving a kind of sensory duet between kitchen and concert hall, made its debut at SCMS’ 2024 Summer Festival and returns for a second edition this Friday.
“I grew up playing classical music. It’s always been one of my two biggest passions,” López-Alt said in a recent joint interview with Ehnes. A violinist himself, he put out feelers to see if anyone wanted to read through Beethoven string quartets when he relocated from the Bay Area to Seattle in 2021.
Ehnes, for his part, had been drawn early in the pandemic to the curiosity-driven approach to cooking that López-Alt explores in his bestselling cookbook “The Food Lab.”
The idea for an event where these enthusiasms could converge is part of SCMS’ ongoing push to rethink how chamber music is experienced — and to reach new audiences.
“This seemed to be a golden opportunity to bring together food and music in a way that would be fun for everybody involved, and insightful and engaging for the audience,” said López-Alt.
The inaugural Tasting Notes presented in 2024 drew close to 1,000 audience members to the main concert hall in Benaroya Hall — nearly double the capacity of the more intimate Nordstrom Recital Hall upstairs, where SCMS’ summer festival concerts are typically held.
“We’re doing it again because we got such good feedback last year,” said López-Alt. “A lot of the folks were there to see the chefs and were more into the food side of it, but then ended up learning a lot more about classical music and chamber music in particular. To be able to introduce a new audience to that is wonderful.”
For this year’s event, they’ve fine-tuned the format so as to encourage a deeper multisensory experience. “Last year, we didn’t know what we were doing until we did it,” Ehnes admitted with a laugh. Tasting Notes II promises to be “more of a variety show that will keep the audience engaged the whole time.”
As four culinary celebrities (in addition to López-Alt) prepare their dishes on one side of the stage, their work will be captured live and projected onto an overhead screen, giving the audience a close-up view of each step. Meanwhile, SCMS musicians perform music by four different composers on the other side, creating a dynamic interplay that will be teased out in conversations hosted by Ehnes and López-Alt.
The chef roster features returning favorites Kelly Van Arsdale (Spinnaker Chocolate) and Kevin Smith (Beast and Cleaver), joined by newcomers Renee Erickson (The Walrus and the Carpenter, Willmott’s Ghost) and Lee Kindell of the MOTO Pizza chain. Ehnes will be joined by pianist Adam Neiman violinist Tessa Lark, violist Joan DerHovsepian and cellists Bion Tsang and Brant Taylor.
As an example of what will happen during the program, the variation movement from a Mozart string trio will serve as the jumping-off point for a comparison with the art of pizza-making. López-Alt and Kindell will each prepare their own interpretation of this culinary form using identical ingredients, just as Mozart spun endless invention from the same theme. The culinary creations will be tasted by all attendees during an after-party in the Benaroya Hall lobby.
Another segment highlights how a classic European framework can be adapted to a local American setting. Known for her genre-crossing fluency, violinist Lark plans to combine music from a virtuoso sonata by Eugène Ysaÿe with a bluegrass-tinged composition of her own. Simultaneously, Erickson will reimagine a traditional French dessert through the lens of “the seasonal time and place, the Pacific Northwestness and terroir of Seattle,” as López-Alt describes it.
To compose music means, literally, to assemble distinct elements — to shape them into a cohesive whole. That activity finds a visceral, unexpected parallel in the segment featuring Smith, who will demonstrate how a butcher interacts with a whole pig, taking it apart, piece by piece, before reassembling it like a puzzle.
A guided tasting led by Spinnaker Chocolate’s Van Arsdale intends to draw connections between the precision craft and sensory nuance — an exercise in slow attention that mirrors the layered detail of chamber music.
“We’re trying to demonstrate how your other senses can affect the way you hear things,” López-Alt said. “Even the direction you’re looking at in the concert hall can shift which parts of the music you notice.”
“Some of the most compelling insights I got last year were things I never would have expected,” Ehnes said. “And I love that. It’s what we try to do with all of our events at Seattle Chamber Music Society: to create a framework for things that are meaningful and occasionally unexpected.”
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