Mad for Classical

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Meeting Alexey Steele, 42, a passionate Soviet-born painter whose cavernous industrial space becomes an underground concert hall once a month, feels like being part of an elaborate performance art piece that could become a joke at any moment.
You half-expect the wild-haired Steele — a cross between a classic Hollywood “mad Russian” and Borat in a fedora — to drop the accent and turn out to be a guy from Des Moines. But he is very much for real, as is his Classical Underground chamber music series, which is developing a below-the-radar international following. The concerts offer chamber pieces — piano sonatas, cello suites, and so on — in a very un-fussy space full of true believers; it’s part of the growing appearance of classical music in alternative spaces such as coffee shops, warehouses and clubs, as well as a reminder of L.A.’s long tradition of under-the-radar classical music, or, in the case of New York’s le poisson rouge, an old jazz club.

Scott Timberg has the atmospheric and surprising story in Sunday Calendar.