Jay DeWire, piano
Hther Haughn, violin
Dana Flesner, cello

Tickets:

PROGRAM:

Piano Trio in C Minor, Op. 1 No.3 - Ludwig van Beethoven

Piano Trio in G Major, L.3 - Claude Debussy

Trio in G Minor, Op. 9 - Frédéric Chopin

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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, Maryland), 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 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.

Recent and upcoming projects include: a discussion of the development of the piano trio from its origins with Mozart's piano trios, to the height of its craft in Brahms' revision of the Piano Trio in B Major, to a more modern adaptation of the genre in Piazzolla's Four Seasons; a look at the very early works of three great composers: Beethoven, Chopin, and Debussy, examining how each composer began with the musical style of their predecessors and eventually transformed that style with their our unique voices; and an exploration of the late periods of Beethoven, Brahms, and Faure and how these three composers chiseled and shaped their individual voices to extreme lengths in their late work.

The West Shore Trio’s commitment to education further extends to include master classes, question-and-answer sessions, and collaborative projects. They maintain an active and developing relationship with 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.