Salastina Presents 'Mozart Masquerade,' Nov 20

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

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Adrienne Andisheh, Sounding Point
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TJ Sclafani, Sounding Point
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SALASTINA PRESENTS
MOZART MASQUERADE

A Fundraiser Benefiting Salastina’s Live Concerts,
Vital Sounds Program, and Composer Collective

Featuring an All-Mozart Program and Austrian Cuisine from
James Beard Award Nominee Bernhard Mairinger

Nov 20, 2025 at 6PM
The Maxwell House; Pasadena, CA

Los Angeles, CA — Salastina, “one of L.A.’s foremost chamber music ensembles” (Beverly Press), presents Mozart Masquerade, a Viennese-themed event featuring 18th-century Austrian food, dance, and an all-Mozart musical program, on November 20, 2025 at 6PM at the Maxwell House in Pasadena, CA. The event will transport the audience to 18th-century Vienna through Viennese bites by Austrian chef and two-time James Beard Award nominee Bernhard Mairinger — one of the first chefs to introduce Austrian cuisine to Los Angeles —as well as a classical dance lesson with Justin Coates of Dance Through Time. The concert will feature some of Mozart’s most treasured chamber works, performed by Salastina’s Co-Artistic Director’s Maia Jasper White and Kevin Kumar, as well as Salastina’s Resident Pianist HyeJin Kim.

Inspired by Mozart’s years in Vienna, guests are invited to don their finest masquerade attire and enjoy a night of light-hearted elegance and virtuosic chamber music. “Salastina aims to create an elevated, analog, sociable salon feel at every one of our events.” says Jasper White. “This mini-gala takes what our audiences love most about that ethos and dials it up to eleven by taking all of us back two hundred-plus years in time — in good fun and for a great cause.”

Proceeds from Mozart Masquerade will help support Salastina’s live concerts as well as two of their community programs: Vital Sounds, Salastina’s partnership with Huntington Health where the ensemble and guest artists provide free virtual bedside concerts for hospital patients; and the Salastina Composer Collective, Salastina’s tuition-free composition mentorship program for young and emerging composers.

Created in May 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, Vital Sounds provides free, live, virtual chamber music and solo performances for patients, their families, and medical staff in the intensive care unit of Huntington Health for patients receiving long-term and end-of-life care. Through Vital Sounds, Salastina musicians and guest artists have provided over 70,000 minutes of one-on-one music to over 4,000 patients and their caregivers. In March 2021, Salastina and Vital Sounds tapped world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma to provide an intimate, free, virtual performance for patients.

The Salastina Composer Collective, an outgrowth of Salastina’s educational efforts, is a tuition-free compositional mentorship and community-building program for emerging composers between the ages of 18 and 30 from around the world. Participants work with Composer Mentor Derrick Skye and Salastina’s ensemble on a chamber piece that is premiered and professionally recorded by Salastina. Alumni of the program include Sakari Dixon Vanderveer, Kian Ravaei, Celina Anna Kintscher, Zygmund de Somogyi, and Luca Pasquini, among dozens of others. True to its purpose, the program has resulted in several high-profile professional chamber music commissions, including the Royal Philharmonic Society and Chamber Music Northwest. This program is completely member-supported, and allows emerging composers from all educational and financial backgrounds to apply and attend.

Tickets for Mozart Masquerade are $375, with $90 of the ticket tax-deductible. The ticket includes dinner, the dance lesson, and the concert. Tickets can be purchased at salastina.org.

CALENDAR EDITORS PLEASE NOTE:
SALASTINA PRESENTS MOZART MASQUERADE
Who: Maia Jasper White, Co-Artistic Director and violin; Kevin Kumar, Co-Artistic Director and violin; HyeJin Kim, piano; Justin Coates, historic dance instructor
When: November 20, 2025 at 6PM
Where: The Maxwell House, 55 S Grand Ave, Pasadena, CA 91105

About Salastina
Salastina is a visionary chamber ensemble and presenting organization based in Los Angeles. The winner of San Francisco Classical Voice’s Audience Choice Award for “Best Chamber Ensemble” and “Best Streaming Series,” Salastina is a 21st-century reimagining of the chamber music salon: a place where musicians and audience members gather to share in the beauty of the art form through performance and conversation, whether in-person for intimate, local audiences or online for tens of thousands around the world. Salastina presents up to 25 public performances per year, most of which are live-streamed online.

Integral to Salastina’s live concerts are context and storytelling, dynamically provided by Resident Host and Artistic Partner Brian Lauritzen (of KUSC fame), as well as ample opportunities for audience members and musicians to engage in conversation. As one audience member put it: “Where else can audiences have a personal conversation with a 'famous musician' who might have been a role model and inspiration? People oftentimes can't even pay money to talk to their favorite performers backstage. Yet Salastina has created an arena where musicians and audiences can connect.”

In keeping with Gustav Mahler’s definition of tradition as “not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire,” Salastina invests equally in the classics and the generation of new music. Salastina’s work in this area has been broadcast dozens of times nationally on Performance Today. Its tuition-free, highly-competitive Sounds Promising Young Composers Program has provided dozens of composers from Italy to Singapore with mentorship and world-class audio-video recordings of their work. Armed with these recordings in their portfolio, alumni have gone on to secure professional commissions. Salastina has also given presentations on career development to students at USC’s Thornton School of Music and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

In May of 2020, Salastina partnered with Project: Music Heals Us and UCLA Medical Center to create Vital Sounds, a program bringing the healing power of music to patients in UCLA’s Intensive Care Unit. Since then, Salastina has provided over 40,000 minutes of one-on-one virtual bedside concerts to over 2,400 patients.

To support Salastina’s work and learn more about upcoming concerts, visit salastina.org. Follow us on Instagram and Facebook at @salastinala.

A two-time James Beard Award nominee (Best New Restaurant and Rising Star Chef), Chef Bernhard Mairinger brought Los Angeles its first taste of authentic Austrian cuisine with BierBeisl Restaurant.

The Austrian born chef started his career in Los Angeles as Chef de Cuisine with the renowned Patina Group, which earned 4 stars by the LA Times during his time there, and was quickly recognized as one of the Top 30Under30 young talents within LA’s hospitality scene. Critical acclaim followed, with BierBeisl being named one of the Best New Restaurants on the lists of Gayot, Zagat, LA Magazine and Angeleno Magazine. After earning rave reviews from the LA Times and LA Weekly, BierBeisl was included in their 101 Best Restaurants and 99 Essential Restaurants lists in Los Angeles.

National recognition arrived when Esquire Magazine named BierBeisl one of the Hottest New Restaurants in America, and shortly after Chef Mairinger competed against Michael Simon and Jeffrey Zakarian on Food Network’s popular show, Iron Chef America. Other important stops of Chef Mairingers young and successful career include Hotel Alex Zermatt (Switzerland), Ashdown Park Hotel (UK), Schloss Fuschl Resort and Spa (Austria), Hotel Zuerserhof (Austria), Restaurant Neichel (Barcelona, Spain), Ristorante Da Gianni (Mannheim, Germany), Restaurant Vendome (Cologne, Germany), and Grande Sheraton Sukhumvit (Bangkok, Thailand).

Baroque-specialist dancer Justin Coates has been a member of the New York Baroque Dance Company since 2010. Favorite performances with NYBDC include Zephyre, the French Festival at Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens, the International Handel Festival production of Teseo, and Pygmalion at the Potsdam Music Festival.

Other Baroque credits include performing in The Cunning Man, with choreography by Caroline Copeland, performing in the Boston Early Music Festival production of Dido and Aeneas, and setting a Folies d’Espagne for American Contemporary Ballet. As a modern dancer, Justin has had the pleasure of working in both New York City and Los Angeles with numerous companies, including Pennington Dance Group, ArtistsPlus, VIA Dance Collective, Anabella Lenzu DanceDrama and Dusan Tynek Dance Theatre. Justin is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College.