Since their first performance on the west shore of the Chesapeake Bay, the West Shore Piano Trio has brought passion, color, and penetrating insight to the works they perform, not only through their playing but also through their commentary and interaction with audiences.

With performances across the mid-Atlantic, the trio has performed at the Chautauqua Institution (Chautauqua, NY), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.), An die Musik (Baltimore, MD), the Duke Ellington School of the Arts (Washington, D.C.), Goucher College (Baltimore, MD), St. Mary’s College of Maryland (St. Mary’s City, MD), Harmony Hall (Fort Washington, MD) and the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts (Hagerstown, MD).

The WSPT believes that education and entertainment enhance each other, and that the better informed an audience is about a work the more deeply they will appreciate its performance. To this end, the members of the trio accompany each concert with brief verbal commentary, providing biographical details about the composer, framing the work in the context of its time, and highlighting thematic and compositional elements of the piece, as well as connections shared between each work on the program. When speaking about the music, they use accessible, jargon-free language that enables the music to be understood by non-musicians and musicians alike.

The West Shore Trio’s commitment to education further extends to include masterclasses, question-and-answer sessions, and collaborative projects. They maintain an active and developing relationship with the Duke Ellington School for the Arts that includes outreach presentations, question-and-answer sessions, and concerts. Additionally, the trio has established a connection with Goucher College, where they have given multiple concerts and also a lecture/performance on Shostakovich’s piano trio, in which they discussed the different levels of meaning in the piece and the effects that politics and personal connections had on its musical language. Other recent projects include a concert program of trios by living composers that highlighted different compositional approaches to the piano trio, and a collaboration with DancEthos dance company that brought live music to the stage in a tapestry of sound, movement, and visual artistry.

Based in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area, the members of the trio were educated at the Eastman School of Music, New England Conservatory, San Francisco Conservatory, Rice University Shepherd School of Music, the University of Illinois, and the University of Maryland. They have studied with or been coached by such esteemed musicians as Lynn Blakeslee, Isaac Stern, Kathleen Winkler, Roland and Almita Vamos, Zvi Zeitlin, Larissa Dedova, Brian Ganz, Bonnie Hampton, Brandon Vamos, and members of the Aborada, Alexander, American, Cleveland, Concord, Juilliard, Kocian, Kronos, Left Bank, Miami, Miró, Pacifica, Penderecki, St. Lawrence, Tákacs, Tokyo, and Ying Quartets.

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