She trained in St. Petersburg, married Cheech Marin in 2009, and books classical music into private front rooms in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree.
On the last Sunday in November, in a Brentwood living room that was not her own, the Russian born pianist Natasha Rubin sat down beside Maria Demina at a single keyboard and played Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker for about three dozen people.
The two have performed together for years as the DoubleSharp Piano Duo, and both trained in St. Petersburg. In January the Palisades fire had destroyed the house Demina shared with her husband, Matt Lichtenberg. It left the home Rubin shares with her own husband, the actor Cheech Marin, as one of only two still standing on their block, and so full of smoke that the couple later sat for an interview in their garage while the place was being cleaned out.
Public radio station KUSC covered the November concert for its Notes from the Fires series. Rubin, who performs and records under her married name, Natasha Marin, told the station the evening felt “life affirming,” and that people needed to see that life goes on.
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A concert series with no address
Rubin founded the Marin Salon Series and runs it the way salons have always been run, out of somebody’s front room, with no hall and no tickets. Guests are given mezcal and blinis, a Mexican habit and a Russian one arriving on the same table.
Portability turns out to be the whole advantage. A damaged concert hall would still have been working through insurers and remediation crews nine months after January, while a salon needs a room and a piano, and Demina and Lichtenberg had resettled somewhere with space for both. The series ran twice more before the year was out, with the Nutcracker in Los Angeles at the end of November and a Baroque program in Joshua Tree in December.
The same privacy that keeps her off the record
Living room concerts are not reviewed, ticketed or archived, and the woman running them has left correspondingly little paperwork behind.
She has no Wikipedia entry of her own and turns up as a single line in her husband’s. Photo agencies were still filing her as Natasha Rubin at premieres and galas through 2025, sixteen years after she legally became Natasha Marin, which leaves a good part of her public record sitting under a name she stopped using.
Her age is not established anywhere reliable. The birth year repeated most often online would have her finishing a Russian bachelor’s degree, conservatory training in St. Petersburg and a graduate degree at UCLA before the 2009 wedding, which the calendar will not allow. The one firm figure belongs to her husband, who was 63 when they married on August 8 that year, in a ceremony officiated by Antonio Villaraigosa, then the mayor of Los Angeles. People reported at the time that the two married at their Malibu home. It was Marin’s third marriage, and his three children all come from the two before it.
Where Natasha Rubin trained
She started early and inside the Russian system, at St. Petersburg’s Special Music School for Gifted Children. The first thing she ever composed, she has said, was an elementary school suite about mice and cats.
After that came a bachelor’s degree with honors from the Rimsky Korsakov Music College and study at the St. Petersburg State Conservatory under Leonid Sintsev and Igor Lebedev. In Los Angeles she took a graduate degree at UCLA, working with Vitaly Margulis, Antoinette Perry and Gloria Cheng, then a Doctor of Musical Arts at the USC Thornton School of Music, with minors in music education, early music and electroacoustic composition. Those last two account for most of what she has done since, from the Baroque programming and the harpsichord she plays alongside the piano to the electronic album she put out two years ago.
Her concert work has taken her to Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall, to the Philharmonic and Capella halls in St. Petersburg, and to Schoenberg and Zipper halls closer to home.
An album, and a category she has criticized
Songs of the Desert arrived in 2024, drawn from the seven or so years she and Cheech have spent splitting their time between Los Angeles and Joshua Tree. It runs about thirty one minutes across eight tracks. The one called “Storm” opens dark and circular in the bass, scatters single notes across it, sends violin figures climbing and falling as the volume rises, then settles into a bright major key at the moment the desert sun returns. A preview paired with artwork by the artist Marta Sanchez went up at the Maguire Museum during the 2024 Philadelphia Fringe Festival.
Rubin does not think much of the company her record keeps. Talking to Palm Springs Life in December 2025, she described a good deal of ambient music as the work of people who “just click a button,” load a ready made patch and upload ten minutes of it, and said her own electronic writing answers to composition technique built up over centuries.
She entered the album for Grammy consideration anyway, in the Best New Age, Ambient or Chant Album category, and she votes in the Recording Academy herself. It was not among the five nominees. Carla Patullo won the category this year.
Her husband works the same room at a different size
Cheech Marin turned 80 last month. He spent about forty years assembling one of the most significant private collections of Chicano art in the country, handed a large part of it to Riverside, where it hangs in a public museum carrying his name, and joined the LACMA board in 2022.
Both of them are in the business of putting people in front of work they would not otherwise meet, and the two approaches part company at the door. A museum takes anyone who walks up to it, while a salon takes whoever gets asked, and the guest list of a house in the Pacific Palisades is not a general audience. The couple have performed a cabaret act together built on the joke of how a man like him ended up with a woman like her, so neither of them seems especially precious about the comparison.
Since the fire
The Palisades house has been slowly coming back. In late July, Rubin was in Montreal reading a paper at the 37th ISME World Conference, a music education gathering rather than a booking, which fits the way she describes herself, as an educator and researcher as much as a performer.
She has said a second desert record may follow, this one drawing on the King of the Hammers off road race out in Johnson Valley. The salons are meant to come home as well. Once the smoke damage is finally dealt with, the couple have said they intend to start hosting again in the Palisades.
