Musical Salons

Studio Chopin hosts occasional musical salons, evenings of live classical piano music in an intimate setting, in the spirit of the gatherings where much of this repertoire was first heard. A few times each year we open the studio for an evening among people who love this music: a recital, and then conversation over a glass of wine.

The evenings

A salon is a small, unhurried thing of music, warmth, and conversation. The music might be given by our faculty, by a visiting artist, or by the advanced pianists who study here; recent evenings have included guests such as the Polish concert pianist Radosław Sobczak. The programmes range widely — Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Prokofieff — but the setting stays the same: fine music, played on a nine foot Steinway concert grand, in a beautiful room overlooking the Los Angeles hillsides, among good company. There is no formality to observe and nothing expected of you but to listen and to enjoy the evening. Newcomers are as welcome as old friends.

The tradition behind them

The music-making at Studio Chopin draws on the Eastern European tradition of the Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw, in which our faculty were trained — a lineage that runs, through teachers such as Bronisława Kawalla and Jan Ekier, former Chair of the Jury of the Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw, back to the Viennese school of Leschetizky and to Chopin himself. It is a tradition that prizes beauty of tone, the shaping of a musical line, and the direct, personal passing-on of the art from one musician to the next. That is the spirit the salons are meant to share: not a performance held at a distance, but an evening of music made close at hand.