Daria Podorozhnova was born in Rostov-on-Don, Russia. She was 6 years old when she started playing the piano in a Special Music School affiliated with the Rostov State Conservatory. Her musical path began in the class of music teacher Inna Serebryanskaya. When Daria was 8 years old she won her first music competition. During her studies in Serebryanskaya's class, Daria became a laureate of many competitions and festivals in Russia, Ukraine and Sweden.

In 2017 Daria started studying in the class of Professor of the Rostov State Conservatory Sergei Osipenko. In 2019 Daria became the winner of III prize of the V International Music Competition for young pianists "Astana Piano Passion", when she was 15. Some years later she became the winner of the II International Music Competition "Rachmaninoff's legacy" in Rostov-on-Don and I International Music Competition for young pianists "New Generation" in Moscow.

Daria has performed across Russia and abroad as a solo recitalist and in concertos, with orchestras including Rostov Symphony Orchestra, Krasnodar Premier-Orchestra, Astana Symphony Orchestra, Irkutsk Symphony Orchestra and Volgodonsk Symphony Orchestra. Daria has been invited to participate in numerous music festivals, including the “Stars on the Baikal” in Irkutsk and “The XVII International Piano Festival "Mariinsky” in St. Petersburg. In March 2024 Daria was awarded the 6th prize of 69th Maria Canals International Competition in Barcelona. In May 2024 Daria has performed as a pianist in “La Traviata” production at Staten Island.

Now Daria is studying for a bachelor’s degree and working with Alexandre Moutouzkine at Manhattan School of Music, where she has been awarded a Harold and Helene Schonberg Pianist Scholarship.

Terri Ji is a 22-year-old pianist from NYC.  She is the 2024 Dora Zaslavsky Koch concerto competition winner at Manhattan School of Music and recently made her New York debut with the MSM Symphony Orchestra performing Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.  Other performance highlights include appearing as a soloist with the Vienna Ball Orchestra at Vienna Konzerthaus and being featured as a Young Artist Awards finalist with Northwest Focus Live, 98.1 KINGFM radio.  She has performed at Klavierhaus in New York, with Virtual Concert Halls as part of their Sound Espressivo Laureates recital series, and is also the winner of 2022 Pacific International Piano Competition and gold medalist at the 2021 Chopin Northwest Festival.  She made her orchestral debut with the Philharmonia Northwest as a winner of the 2017 Seattle Young Artists Music Festival. 

She is currently a junior at the Manhattan School of Music, where she studies with Marc Silverman. 

Inesa Sinkevych is laureate of the 12th Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition, a Ukrainian-born pianist who also won first prizes in the Maria Canals International Piano Competition in Barcelona and the Concurso Internacional de Piano Premio “Jaén” in Spain, as well as awards in the Minnesota International Yamaha Piano-e-Competition; the Vianna da Motta and the Porto international competitions in Portugal among others.

Inesa Sinkevych has been praised for her “intense, thrilling and sophisticated playing” (General-Anzeiger, Germany), “brilliant note-perfect fluency” (New York Concert Review), “grand passion and elegant lyricism” (Audiophile Audition), and “rich cantabile” (Ritmo, Spain). She has been described as a “Schubertian of real distinction,” with a “maturity that belies her age (Music Web International), and as an “artist with intuition that knows to look far beyond technique” (Diario de Noticias, Lisbon). “Grasping the overarching structure and purpose,” writes JWR Review, “is Sinkevych’s strength.”

As soloist she has appeared with the Israel Philharmonic, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Gulbenkian Orchestra of Lisbon, Orquesta Nacional del Cuba, the Gran Canaria Philharmonic of Spain, the Porto Symphony of Portugal, the Tenerife Symphony of the Canary Islands, the Warsaw Symphony Orchestra, and the Kharkov Youth Orchestra, among others. She has performed as recitalist, chamber player, and orchestral soloist at the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv, the Purcell Room in London’s Royal Festival Hall, the Minnesota Orchestra Hall, the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona, the Hong Kong City Hall, Guanghualu Arts Center in Beijing, Joaquin Rodrigo Auditorium in Madrid, the National Philharmonic Hall of Ukraine, and the Great Hall of the Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon. Recent performances include appearances at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall and Merkin Concert Hall in New York, Bar Harbor Music Festival, Dame Myra Hess Concert Series in Chicago, Festival de El Valle de Anton in Panama, with the Orquesta National del Cuba and Orquesta Mozartiano de La Habana, as well as in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenyang, and Guangzhoua in China on tour. Inesa Sinkevych appeared live on WFMT Chicago, Kol Israel, Classical WETA Washington, the RDP Portugal, Minnesota Public Radio, and Mezzo Classic TV Channel, France. She performed at the Israeli Presidential Conference (2008) in Jerusalem for U.S. President G.W. Bush and Israeli President Shimon Peres.

Inesa Sinkevych is guest faculty at the Interharmony (Italy), Euroarts (Halle, Germany), Manhattan in the Mountains (Catskills, NY), Summit (New York), and Forum Musicae (Madrid, Spain) summer festivals. A judge for the Maria Canals de Barcelona International Piano Competition, Junior Peace and Music Ambassador Competition and head of the jury for the International Shostakovich Piano Competition in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, she also serves as visiting faculty at the FaceArt Music School in Shanghai and as an honorary advisor to the Leaves Music School in Nanjing, China.

Inesa Sinkevych began her piano studies at the Kharkov Special Music School in her native Ukraine with Victor Makarov and later studied with Alexander Volkov at the Rubin Academy of Music in Tel Aviv. A scholarship from the America–Israel Cultural Foundation enabled her to further her studies with Solomon Mikowsky in the United States, where she received her Master of Music degree at the Chicago College of Performing Arts and her Doctor of Musical Arts degree at Manhattan School of Music. Dr. Sinkevych has been a member of the Piano faculty of Manhattan School of Music’s College Division since 2014 and Precollege Division since 2008, and is serving as a Co-Head of the Piano Department at the Manhattan School of Music since 2022.

This season pianist Steven Beck appears with the orchestras of Princeton and Chattanooga, can be heard in chamber music in Chicago and Oklahoma City, and repeats his annual Christmas Eve performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations at Bargemusic, which has become a New York institution. As a soloist Mr. Beck has performed with the New York Philharmonic and the National Symphony and has appeared at Carnegie Hall, David Geffen Hall, Alice Tully Hall, the Kennedy Center, and the Library of Congress; summer concerts have been at the Aspen Music Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, and Lincoln Center Out of Doors. As an orchestral musician he has played with the New York Philharmonic, the New York City Ballet Orchestra, and Orpheus.

An experienced performer of new music, Steven Beck has premiered works by Charles Wuorinen and Fred Lerdahl. He can be heard on over 40 CDs, including the first complete recording of George Walker’s piano sonatas, for Bridge Records. Mr. Beck is a member of the Knights, the Talea Ensemble, Quattro Mani, and the Da Capo Chamber Players. He is on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the Sewanee Summer Music Festival. A Steinway Artist, he is a graduate of the Juilliard School, where he now teaches orchestral piano.

Marilyn Crispell is a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music where she studied classical piano and composition, and has been a resident of Woodstock, New York since 1977 when she came to study and teach at the Creative Music Studio. She discovered jazz through the music of John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and other contemporary jazz players and composers. For ten years she was a member of the Anthony Braxton Quartet and the Reggie Workman Ensemble and has been a member of the Barry Guy New Orchestra and guest with his London Jazz Composers Orchestra, as well as a member of the Henry Grimes Trio, Tiszigi Munoz Ensemble, and Quartet Noir (with Urs Leimgruber, Fritz Hauser and Joelle Leandre). She has toured and recorded with Anders Jormin's Bortom Quintet and with Gunhild Seim's Time Jungle. In 2018 she created a piece, ICE, for Seim's Kitchen Orchestra, performed in Stavanger, Norway. In 2005 she performed and recorded with the NOW Orchestra in Vancouver, Canada and in 2006 she was co-director of the Vancouver Creative Music Institute and a faculty member at the Banff Centre International Workshop in Jazz. In 2014 she led a three-week music residency at the Atlantic Center For the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, Florida, and in 2016 led a one-week residency at the Conservatory Manuel de Falla in Buenos Aires. In 2019 she was a guiding artist at the Jazzdanmark Summer Session in Denmark.

Currently she is touring and recording with two different trios: Joe Lovano's Trio Tapestry (with Carmen Castaldi) and the Dreamstruck Trio with Harvey Sorgen and Joe Fonda. She also plays with Scottish saxophonist Raymond MacDonald and the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra. She and MacDonald have toured and recorded, and have collaborated on art and music exhibitions with artists Jo Ganter and Melinda Stickney-Gibson, and musicians George Burt, Doug James and David Rothenberg at the Kleinert-James Art Center in Woodstock, NY (2017), and at the Jane Street Gallery in Saugerties, NY (2022). She has collaborated with Angelica Sanchez, Tanya Kalmanovitch, Tyshawn Sorey, David Rothenberg and others, and is currently playing in Michala Ostergaard's trio with Thommy Andersson in Scandinavia. Besides working as a soloist and leader of her own groups (including trios with Gary Peacock or Mark Helias and Paul Motian), Crispell has performed and recorded extensively with well-known players on the American and international jazz scene. She's also performed and recorded music by contemporary composers Robert Cogan, Pozzi Escot, John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Manfred Niehaus and Anthony Davis (including four performances of his opera "X" with the New York City Opera in 1986).

In addition to playing, she has taught improvisation workshops and given lecture/demonstrations at universities and art centers in the U.S., Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and has collaborated with videographers, filmmakers, dancers and poets.

Crispell has been the recipient of three New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship grants (1988-1989, 1994-1995 and 2006-2007), a Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust composition commission (1988-1989), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005-2006). She is also the recipient of a 2025 National Foundation for the Arts Jazz Master Award. In 2006 she performed her Guggenheim project, Cy Twombly Dreamhouse, with music, dance and slide projections at the Kleinert-James Art Center in Woodstock, NY. In 1996 she was given an Outstanding Alumni Award by the New England Conservatory, and in 2004, was cited as being one of their 100 most outstanding alumni of the past 100 years.