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Stefano de Pieri to host Canberra International Music Festival dinner

Natasha Rudra

Stefano de Pieri.
Stefano de Pieri.Supplied

Stefano de Pieri is about to head to the Canberra International Music Festival to help host a gala dinner but he tells me he's just finished a little musical tour of his own.

It was called the Venetian Feast of Food and Music. De Pieri joined forces with Italian soprano Stefania Bellamio and guitarist Massimo Scattolin to give performances of food and music around Australia. He cooked a sumptuous three course Venetian meal, matched with his own wines and beer from his hometown of Mildura. Meanwhile Bellamio performed opera arias and traditional gondolier songs while Scattolin accompanied her on guitar. "I've been running around everywhere, Melbourne, Broken Hill, Adelaide, Castlemaine with these musicians," he says. "They've played and I've cooked."

So it makes perfect sense that De Pieri will be hosting the Canberra music festival's big dinner at the Arboretum on April 30. The food will be put together by three top local chefs: Ben Willis of Aubergine, James Mussillon from Courgette, and Clement Chauvin from Les Bistronomes. Artists from the Canberra International Music Festival will sing and perform during the dinner, which also raises funds for the festival's Youth Artist Fellowship program.

De Pieri's always had an interest in music. His brother Sergio is a musician, who worked in Italy as an academic and chief organist at "the most beautiful church in Venice". And De Pieri helped set up the Mildura Arts Festival in the Victorian country town where he's lived for the past 25 years. "We brought music to the country, not only in Mildura but along the whole length of the Murray river from time to time," he says, professing a particular interest in seeing young, up and coming Australian musicians. "We also helped set up the Ballarat Music Festival. Ballarat is big, it's huge."

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He's looking forward to checking out the Canberra food scene which has come on in leaps and bounds. "You have terrific wines around there, you've got good produce and people with the ability to discern and the average income is higher than other towns. If that doesn't generate some interesting food, well I'll be damned," he says, quite frankly. "You've got the formula there, you've got the location, the food and the wine."

Canberra also has a climatic advantage, De Pieri reckons, in the form of the four seasons. "It's a privilege in Australia to be in a town with demarcated seasons," he says. "Where I am it's reasonably warm all the time so there are certain foods you don't think about cooking of preparing because they demand cold weather. Likewise if you're in Queensland it's a bit boring to have all the same type of food. I'm a bit jealous of that."

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Default avatarNatasha Rudra is an online editor at The Australian Financial Review based in London. She was the life and entertainment editor at The Canberra Times.

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