Since their first performance on the Western Shore of the Chesapeake Bay in 2008, 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.

The West Shore Trio began the 2012/13 season with their fourth performance at the Chautauqua Institution in New York; additional highlights include performances in California, Pennsylvania, New York, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia. They are excited to be collaborating with DancEthos again this season and will be giving the premier performance of the dance piece The Divide in November 2012. Set to the music of Rebecca Clarke and exploring the complex landscape of gender bias and definition, this collaborative work will again be featured in February 2013 as part of the innovative multi-genre Intersections Festival in Washington, D.C. Recent performances include concerts at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, An die Musik, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, Goucher College, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Harmony Hall, and the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts.

The WSPT believes that education and live performance 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 relationship with the Duke Ellington School for the Arts, and additionally, the trio has established a connection with Goucher College, where they have given multiple concerts and also a lecture/performance on the political and personal elements of Shostakovich’s piano trio.

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 violinists Lynn Blakeslee, Isaac Stern, Kathleen Winkler, Roland and Almita Vamos, and Zvi Zeitlin, pianists Larissa Dedova and Brian Ganz, cellists Bonnie Hampton and 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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