Un Regret de bouillabaisse

The recipe for bouillabaisse in Henri Philippon’s Cuisine de Provence includes a rather tasty anecdote. “You’d be hard-pressed to claim to know the recipe for bouillabaisse: there are almost as many recipes as there are Provencal families! So we’ll give you one without claiming it’s the most classic, or even the best. Let’s just hope it’s the one that so enchanted Claude Debussy, who, according to Léon Daudet, promised himself to write a song for a bouillabaisse regret. To date, there is no trace of this piece, but it does provide a stimulating space and title for the writing of a work as part of the Rose des vents project by cellist Noémi Boutin and chef Emmanuel Perrodin. The idea here is to open up a gap between Debussystesque sound materials and electronically generated kitchen sounds, rather like the ingredients of a bouillabaisse. The aim is also to develop a spoken and sung dialogue between the musician and the cook or actor-narrator, based on an original text written by the poet Dominique Quélen. Through these multiple dialogues, this work attempts to build a little imaginary cookery theater, where artistic boundaries gradually fade away, and which can be performed in total autonomy.
Aurélien Dumont