Violinist Grant Houston connects with listeners through performances of unbridled energy and emotional magnetism. Particularly devoted to chamber music, he appears frequently at festivals across the country such as Spoleto Festival USA (Bank of America Chamber Music), the Grand Canyon Music Festival, Staunton Music Festival, the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, and is in demand as a performer at numerous chamber music series, including Chamber Music Society of Central Virginia, Chiarina Chamber Players, Monadnock Music, Wellesley Chamber Players, First Mondays at Jordan Hall, Castle of Our Skins, and Juventas New Music. He is a member and co-artistic director of the GRAMMY-nominated Palaver Strings, and performs often with A Far Cry, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.

As the violinist of Trio Gaia, Houston has helped to build one of today’s most exciting piano trios, recognized for bringing audiences dynamic, personally relevant experiences inside and outside the concert hall. Houston completed undergraduate and graduate study at the New England Conservatory of Music as a student of Donald Weilerstein and Ayano Ninomiya.

Pianist Dina Vainshtein collaborates with some of the most promising musicians of our time. Now based in Boston, she is the daughter of two pianists, and studied with Boris Berlin and Arthur Aksenov at the prestigious Gnessin Russian Academy of Music in Moscow. At the 1998 International Tchaikovsky Competition, she received the Special Prize for the Best Collaborative Pianist.

In recent concerts she has collaborated with violinists Miriam Fried, Yura Lee, Karen Gomyo, Chad Hoopes, Caroline Goulding, Zina Schiff, Alexi Kenney, and Angelo Yu; cellists Natasha Brofsky and Amit Peled; as well as the Borromeo String Quartet.

She came to the United States in 2000 to attend the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she worked with Vivian Hornik Weilerstein and Donald Weilerstein. She soon found numerous performing opportunities in the US, from Alice Tully Hall and Weill Recital Hall in New York City, to the Caramoor Festival, Music at Menlo, the Ravinia Festival, the Music Academy in the West at Santa Barbara, not to mention tours of Japan, China, Europe, and Russia.

For nearly a decade, Vainshtein has been affiliated with the New England Conservatory and the Walnut Hill School, where she teaches chamber music. At both institutions she worked with Benjamin Zander in his renowned interpretation classes. Maestro Zander praised their collaboration as “the perfect partnership; [she is] the ultimate professional.”