Salastina Presents 'The Universe Sounds Delicious,' Apr 28

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 

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SALASTINA PRESENTS
THE UNIVERSE SOUNDS DELICIOUS
A SPACE-THEMED SALON
PAIRING GOURMET FOOD & LIVE MUSIC

Featuring Music from Star Wars, Interstellar, 
Gustav Holst’s The Planets, and More;
A 5-Course Meal by MasterChef Alum and Chef Becky Brown

With Special Guest Speakers & Performers:
NASA Astronomer Steve Bryson
LIGO Engineers Arnaud Pele & Marie Kasprczak

Sunday, April 28, 2024
The Revery, Los Angeles, CA

 

 

LOS ANGELES, CA  - On April 28, 2024 at the Revery in Mission Junction, Salastina, one of Los Angeles’s foremost chamber music ensembles, presents The Universe Sounds Delicious, a space-themed salon concert paired with a 5-course meal by chef and MasterChef alum Becky Brown. The concert will feature music from beloved space and sci-fi classics, including Star Wars, Interstellar, and Star Trek: Below Decks, as well as space-themed chamber music by Gustav Holst, Terry Riley, and Carolina Eyck. The chamber ensemble will be joined by NASA astronomer and multi-instrumentalist Steve Bryson, and the event will feature special guest speakers Arnaud Pele and Marie Kasprczak, both of whom are engineers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech). During the salon, audience members will be immersed in a space-like setting designed by Theme Edit’s Mercedes Curran.

Salastina’s Sounds Delicious series came about after Brown attended one of Salastina’s concerts in 2018. “Becky came to one of our concerts and she offered to partner up,” says Co-Artistic Director Maia Jasper White. “We’ve felt like we really hit our creative stride doing heavily- themed events together. In the past year, she helmed this hugely successful Barbie-themed pop-up around the country, so it makes sense to partner again for this out-of-this-world program.” The most recent iteration of Sounds Delicious was a Gilded Age-themed Christmas brunch at the Doheny Mansion with the Yuletide Carolers that transported the audience to the late 19th-century. Audience members heard music by turn-of-the-century composers such as Debussy, Fauré, and Bruch paired with vintage dishes such as trout with lobster sauce américaine, leg of lamb roulade, and Eton mess.

With The Universe Sounds Delicious, the arts and sciences come together, thanks to Salastina’s expanding fanbase and White’s position as Director of Chamber Music at CalTech, one of the premier research universities in the United States. The concert will feature NASA astronomer Steve Bryson on theremin for Salastina’s performance of Carolina Eyck’s Oakunar Lynntuja (Strange Birds). White mentions how meeting Bryson was almost happenstance: “...we met Steve because we had programmed Carolina 's Fantasias on our ‘Here Be Dragons’  program in the 2021/2022 season. She was going to come from Germany herself to play them with us, but was ultimately unable to due to COVID. She recommended her ‘best student’ Steve, because they'd been working on these pieces for years. Then we found out what Steve does for his job.”

Bryson is a leading researcher on the study of exoplanets, or planets that exist outside of our Solar System, at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA as part of NASA’s Kepler/K2 mission. The Kepler/K2 mission has surveyed nearly 500,000 stars and has found 548 different exoplanets across a wide swath of space. Before his work with Kepler/K2, Bryson developed systems utilizing virtual reality to visualize computer simulations of science problems as part of NASA’s Virtual Reality Laboratory.

Meanwhile, engineers Arnuad Pele and Marie Kasprzack, who both studied chamber music with White at CalTech, will talk more about their work with LIGO, which includes “listening” to gravitational waves that form after the collisions of heavy-mass objects such as black holes and neutron stars. This breakthrough in the detection of gravitational waves won physicists Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017 (both Thorne and Barish are professors emeriti at CalTech).

Sounds Delicious is one of many of Salastina’s programs that modernizes chamber music concerts for 21st-century audiences. Other programs as part of their main concert series include Sounds Genius, which are deep dives into chamber masterworks; Sounds Mysterious, Salastina’s classical music equivalent of a blind wine-tasting hosted by KUSC’s Brian Lauritzen; Sounds Local, their chamber music concerts that celebrate composers local to Southern California; and Sounds Unknown, a musicological exploration of under-recognized and under-represented composers from the past. Salastina also regularly performs music from and inspired by beloved films and television programs, and has partnered with other performing arts organizations and local businesses in multidisciplinary and multisensory concerts, including Leela Dance Collective, Jones Coffee Roasters, and Tonality, among others.

General admission for the event is $295, which includes the 5-course meal and the performance. Tickets are available to purchase at salastina.org.

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CALENDAR EDITORS PLEASE NOTE:
SALASTINA PRESENTS THE UNIVERSE SOUNDS DELICIOUS
Who: Salastina: Maia Jasper White & Kevin Kumar, violins & Co-Artistic Director; Yoshika Masuda, cello; Linnea Powell, viola; Steve Bryson, theremin & speaker; Arnaud Pele & Marie Kasprczak, guest speakers; Becky Brown, chef; Mercedes Curran, experience design
When: Sunday, April 28, 2024 at 6pm
Where: The Revery; 1700 Naud Street, Los Angeles, CA, 90012

HOLST		“Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity” from The Planets, Op. 32
Hans ZIMMER		Selections from Interstellar
Chris WESTLAKE		Selections from Star Trek: Below Decks
Terry RILEY		Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector
John WILLIAMS		Selections from Star Wars
Carolina EYCK		Oakunar Lynntuja (Strange Birds)

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Salastina was founded in 2010 by violinists Kevin Kumar and Maia Jasper White, who continue to direct the series. Our roster of musicians consists of Resident Artists and special guests. Salastina currently offers three areas of programming, which all serve their mission of connecting others to music in areas where they, as musicians, see a distinct need: in-person and virtual performances; Vital Sounds, their private, virtual bedside concerts three days each week for patients in UCLA’s ICU; and Sounds Promising, their tuition-free Young Artist program.

With an eye towards modernizing the culture around classical music, Salastina presents both Happy Hour salons and an ever-so-slightly-more-traditional Main Series Concerts. Salastina is a member of Chamber Music LA, a collective of 8 local chamber music organizations dedicated to making Los Angeles the chamber music capital of the world.

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In 2012, chef Becky Brown emerged as a standout among 45,000 applicants, securing a coveted spot on the FOX show MasterChef. Throughout the competition, she honed her culinary skills under the discerning eyes of esteemed chefs such as Gordon Ramsay, Joe Bastianich, Graham Elliot, and Alain Ducasse. Despite finishing in 3rd place, the experience propelled her to shift gears from their career as a food photographer to pursue cooking full-time, delving into the demanding kitchens of Los Angeles' most renowned restaurants.

Transitioning from stage at Providence under Chef Michael Cimarusti to chef de commis at Rays and Stark Bar with Chef Kris Morningstar, Brown immersed herself in the rigors of professional cooking. By 2014, she was entrenched as a chef de partie at The Churchkey, while simultaneously laying the groundwork for her own culinary venture, Bang Bang Brunch. Leaving behind the confines of the restaurant line, she dedicated her efforts to launching Bang Bang, which quickly evolved into a thriving catering and personal chef brand. Alongside catering for high-profile clients and styling food for television appearances, Brown ventured into restaurant consulting, collaborating with industry veterans to bring innovative concepts to life. From the inception of Lately, her brunch haven in downtown Los Angeles, to conceptualizing immersive culinary experiences like the Barbie-themed cafe and Family Guy-inspired pop-up, her expertise continues to shape the culinary landscape, offering a blend of creativity and precision to every endeavor.

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Steve Bryson is a multi-instrumentalist and composer who explores ambient soundscapes. He has performed on instruments ranging from modular synthesizers through theremin to Renaissance lute and crumhorn.  He has written soundtracks for the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and immersive video installations in Leipzig. For his day job, he is an astronomer who searches for and studies planets orbiting other stars.

 

 

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