“The second movement is . . . ” Ben Houge, a composer and Berklee professor, was about to tell me about pumpkin soup. “Second course, second movement. I end up using these interchangeably.” Packaging meals with evenings in concert halls is nothing new, but Houge is collaborating with the Boston Symphony Orchestra to offer a unique preconcert dining option this week: a four-course “food opera” inspired by a Vivaldi piccolo concerto on the BSO’s program.
Houge has presented food operas before in collaboration with chef Jason Bond, composing music intended to accompany specific dishes. At the BSO’s dinner, each place setting came with an iPad, which described each course and emitted a Vivaldi-inspired soundscape that changed with each course. The menu, which Houge co-designed, highlighted sweet and sour flavors such as pumpkin and citrus, following research that shows high frequency noises enhance such tastes. “He’s sort of like Oz in the corner orchestrating the whole thing,” BSO director of marketing Sarah Manoog said earlier by phone. “He can deliver different content to each iPad as he chooses to.”
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The concept was intriguing, but the BSO’s dinner indicated food operas are meant to be chamber operas. The sound was perpetually subsumed under a thick layer of conversation, and some of the older diners at my eight-seat table could not discern the intricate curtain of higher frequency sounds emanating from the iPad, even during natural lulls in ambient noise. An old piece of wisdom held: The more people you have to cook for, the more difficult it is.
Zoë Madonna can be reached at zoe.madonna@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @knitandlisten. Madonna’s work is supported by the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation.