About Us
Le Salon de Musiques - MASTERS REDISCOVERED
Francois CHOUCHAN
Founder & artistic director
Acclaimed French-American pianist François Chouchan is a sensitive and generous artist whose beauty of sound, clarity of texture and integrity of interpretation have been highly praised. The “neo-romantic melodist” likes to consider himself as “an emissary of love.” Since the beginning of his career, Chouchan has been completely involved with his audience.
“Playing music is a true act of love,” he says. “The intimate relationship with the public is essential. During my performances, I invite people to embark with me for a unique inner journey. Opening my heart, I share my deep feelings and emotions with them. I become transparent, almost vulnerable. I narrate a story. Each note becomes a word and each melody a sentence. It is very intense, sensual and fusional.”
Chouchan has appeared in recitals, and with orchestras and chamber music ensembles on several continents. Instructed by Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen, Germaine Mounier and Jean Hubeau at the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique de Paris, he was unanimously awarded first prize in Piano and Chamber Music. As the third prize winner of the prestigious Viotti International Piano Competition in Italy, he was invited to perform for several Masters, including Mstislav Rostropovich, Nikita Magaloff, Georgy Sebok and Magda Tagliaferro.
A Franz Schubert specialist, Chouchan exemplifies the beauty of the Austrian Master’s scores with his exquisite touch and richness of colors.
“I always had a very strong connection with Franz Schubert,” he says. “His spirit seems to be linked to my heart. His music transcends the time and centuries. It seems to me that Schubert used his music as a mirror, a therapy. Expressing his loneliness, pain and melancholy, his scores evoke his furtive hope, sadness, candor and disillusion. They talk about his contrition and resignation. His music is totally unique and divine.”
An active chamber music player, Chouchan likes to reintroduce and play forgotten scores written by wonderful Romantic and Neo-Romantic composers. “So many gems have been kept inside the drawers forever,” he says. “It is my goal and expectation to take them out. The world deserves to rediscover them.”
A creative person, Chouchan is also a composer of melodic soundtracks for films. He has also collaborated with different contemporary ballet companies, performing Schubert Cycle “Winterreise” for baritone and piano with two dancers as a world premiere.
In 2007, Chouchan relocated in Los Angeles. He has performed in many famous venues, including the LACMA, Schoenberg Hall, California State University’s Long Beach, Northridge the First Presbyterian Church of Santa Monica, Brandeis-Bardin Institute, L’Ermitage Foundation, Music Academy of Santa Barbara, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, St. Mary’s Church in New Orleans, and the California Club of Los Angeles. He also performs regularly in France. In 2010, Chouchan founded Le Salon de Musiques, an intimate chamber music concert series held in Los Angeles for 11 years. In 2021, artistic director Chouchan relocated to the San Diego area, and so did the concert series. For more information, visit www.Francois-Chouchan.com.
Dr. Kristi Brown-Montesano
Musicologist
As a public scholar, educator, and musicologist, Dr. Kristi Brown-Montesano finds joy in teaching people about music and culture.
Currently a Lecturer in Musicology at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music, Brown-Montesano also works as a scholar-educator with many of Southern California’s most distinguished musical organizations, including the Los Angeles Opera, Los Angeles Philharmonic, La Jolla Music Society, and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County. Having served as a “musicological host” for Le Salon de Musiques when the series was based in Los Angeles, she is delighted to rejoin this unique concert experience in beautiful La Jolla.
A respected opera scholar, Brown-Montesano authored the book Understanding the Women of Mozart’s Operas (University of California Press, 2007), offering fresh critical takes on the female roles in the Da Ponte operas and The Magic Flute. The feminist lens of the book has attracted a growing audience of readers interested in the ethics of opera culture and production; in fact, the book was re-released as a paperback in 2021.
Brown-Montesano has also presented and published essays on a wide variety of topics including classical music in contemporary culture (use in media, initiatives targeting families and children, gender and representation), various manifestations of Sherlock Holmes as musician, and the popular reception of J.S. Bach in postwar America from Glenn Gould to the Golden Record to Hannibal Lecter. For more information, visit her website kristibrownmontesano.com.
For nearly two decades (2003–2022), she served as a faculty member and chair of music history at the Colburn Conservatory of Music, but has broadened her “classroom” in recent years to include many different types of students and audiences.
Adam Knight Gilbert
Musicologist
Adam Knight Gilbert, musicology, recorder and historical double reeds, is one of the premier international players of the Renaissance shawm.
He grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. The first graduate of the Early Music program at the Mannes College of Music in New York City, he has performed as a member of New York’s Ensemble for Early Music, the Waverly Consort and Piffaro, the Renaissance Band.
He has appeared with ensembles such as Calliope, ARTEK, New York Cornet and Sackbut Ensemble, The Court Dance Company of New York, the Folger Consort, Concert Royal, The Bach Ensemble, Chatham Baroque, Newberry Consort, Canto (Colombia) and La Caccia Alta (Belgium) among others. He is also a founding member of ensemble Ciaramella, which performs concerts of fifteenth-century music in the U.S., Israel, and Belgium, and has recorded on the Naxos label.
Gilbert studied recorder at Rotterdams Conservatorium and studied in Leuven, Belgium from 1998 to 2000 as a recipient of the Fulbright and Belgian American Education Foundation Grants working on his dissertation “Elaboration in Heinrich Isaac’s Three-Voice Mass Sections and Untexted Compositions.” He completed his Ph.D. at Case Western Reserve University in 2003 and taught for two years as a visiting assistant professor at Stanford University.
Gilbert can be heard on Dorian, Deutsche Grammophon’s Archiv, Passacaille, Musica Americana and Lyrichord labels. His research specialties include allusion in fifteenth-century song and Mass, pastourelles and their symbolism, improvisation, compositional processes and embellishment from 1400–1700. He lectures, gives master classes internationally and is an adjunct faculty of Tilburg Conservatorium in Holland.
Dr. Ross Mitchell
Musicologist
An active pianist, composer, and musicologist, Dr. Ross Mitchell brings all three of these perspectives together in his exploration of music and its historical-cultural contexts.
He completed his doctoral studies in musicology at UCLA in June 2024; his dissertation on Alexander Skryabin seeks to understand the influences that the composer’s esoteric mysticism had on his music – and vice-versa – by using the experience of playing these ritualistic works as an avenue for analysis.
As a teacher, Ross has lectured on a variety of musical topics, including the complex politics of Russian musical nationalism in the 19th century, the idiosyncratic musical and social characteristics of French Impressionism, and the history of video game music.
His lectures draw on his tripartite perspective in order to understand both the music itself and its place within a social and historical context. Ross is currently teaching piano and music theory in his own private studio, composing the soundtrack for an educational video game, and writing a book that expands upon his dissertation research.