Melissa Errico & Adam Gopnik

Love, Desire & Mystery — Il Parle, Elle Chante

With Tedd Firth on piano

World Premiere

Love

Thursday, October 14, 2020

Acclaimed Broadway actress and chanteuse Melissa Errico, working in collaboration with New Yorker essayist and lyricist Adam Gopnik, presents a series of three concerts weaving together music and conversation.

The trio of concerts delves into every aspect of the great French obsession: l’amour fou, or crazy, overpowering, all-consuming love. Through these evenings Errico and Gopnik investigate and illuminate the cycle that France first offered the world—of how love becomes desire, how desire is cloaked in mystery, and how then the mystery of desire reveals the madness of love again.

The first concert of the series centered on love, a special preoccupation in France. It began with the invention of the love song in the feminist medieval court of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and wound its way through the long history of the French cult of love. Melissa Errico presented her favorite French love songs—including Michel Legrand’s “Valse des Lilas,” among others—as well as examples of the American love of France, including Cole Porter’s “I Love Paris,” Sondheim’s portrait of Seurat, and additional delectable surprises. Errico also performed the world premiere of a love song written by Adam Gopnik and David Shire from a musical they are developing about Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Desire was presented on January 28, 2021 — watch on demand

Mystery will be presented LIVE from FIAF on May 6, 2021.

Learn more at fiaf.org.