The Best Cuisine
The Best Cuisine
The Best Cuisine: Music of Carlos Simon, recorded by Washington DC’s Chiarina Chamber Players, highlights the power of Carlos Simon’s storytelling through his chamber music. Centered around The Best Cuisine, a work commissioned by Chiarina, the album features music for combinations of strings, piano, and baritone. Released by Azica Records in August 2025.
About the Album
About the Album
This album centers around The Best Cuisine (2022), a work for baritone, violin, cello, and piano commissioned by Chiarina Chamber Players, with support from Chamber Music America and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Its text, by baritone Carl DuPont, celebrates the craft of cooking that both he and Simon honed during the pandemic. At its core is a spirit of collaboration — a coming together of art song and culinary flair, musical styles, and friendships.
Chiarina Chamber Players, hailed by the Washington Post for putting on “some of the most compelling chamber programs” in DC, premiered The Best Cuisine in 2022. In 2024, Chiarina’s artistic directors, cellist Carrie Bean Stute and pianist Efi Hackmey, reunited with violinist Domenic Salerni and baritone Carl DuPont to record the piece along with additional works by Simon at Chiarina’s longtime venue, the historic St. Mark’s Church in Capitol Hill. These chamber works are at turns meditative, whimsical, and poetic, and always deeply personal.
Tracklist:
1. be still and know
2. Lickety Split
The Best Cuisine*
3. Grace
4. Inscription
5. Salmon with Kale
6. Inscription
7. Mac and Cheeze
8. Interlude
9. Roux
10. Interlude
11. Healthy Ramen
12. Nightfall
13. Dead Fires*
14. Prayer
15. Caro mio ben
16. Between Worlds (version for violin)
17. Between Worlds (version for cello)
18. Sleep Well*
* = world premiere recordings
be still and know (violin, cello, and piano) takes inspiration from an interview with Oprah Winfrey about the presence of God.
Lickety Split (cello and piano) recalls the words and playful spirit of Simon’s grandfather urging him to do chores during childhood summers spent in Rocky Mount, Virginia.
Between Worlds (in versions for cello and for violin) explores the art of Bill Traylor, whose work is situated between two disparate worlds: rural and urban, Black and white, old and new.
Caro mio ben is Simon’s version of the classic Italian art song. He further responds to the rich art song tradition of composers such as Ravel, Richard Strauss, and Schoenberg in his settings of compelling texts by poets Courtney Ware Lett, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Langston Hughes in In Nightfall, Dead Fires, and Prayer.
Sleep Well, originally written for the composer’s nephew, closes the album with a graceful meditation for solo piano.
