I live in Torino [Turin], a town where I grew up, where I was born. There’s a famous dish from there called bagna cauda. It’s a meeting of the garlic from the area of Piedmont, the mountains, with the anchovies coming from the sea in Liguria. It’s a very simple dish, a bit like a broth, perfect in winter, and you eat it with raw vegetables of the season. But there’s so much garlic in it that, when you eat it, you need a couple of days away from other people.
There is a connection between how you eat and how you make music: the way you blend the elements that you eat, the colours, it’s similar to composing a piece of music. If I take my solo piano repertoire, I would associate it with a very simple food, with few elements and few colours, not overelaborate. If I think of a piece of mine with more instruments, more orchestral, I would associate it with a dish, maybe a soup, that is made of different elements that were cooked for hours, and you can taste the different layers and ingredients in your mouth.
