Puget Sound Piano Trio

The Puget Sound Piano Trio is the ensemble-in-residence at University of Puget Sound School of Music in Tacoma, WA. Over the Trio’s rich four-decade history, it has presented hundreds of concerts in a multitude of venues, from celebrated biannual performances on the university’s Jacobsen Concert Series to appearances in prominent concert halls throughout the United States. 

Trio members Maria Sampen (violin), Alistair MacRae (cello), and Ronaldo Rolim (piano) bring distinguished musical backgrounds and a rich variety of professional experiences to their work as an ensemble.  The Trio has appeared individually and as an ensemble with orchestras and at major music festivals throughout the United States and abroad, such as Aspen, Ravinia, Brevard, and Banff, among many others. As frequent guests at KING FM Seattle's Northwest Focus Live, the Trio's latest visit to the show was featured nationally on NPR Music Live Sessions. Recent and upcoming engagements include performances and artistic residencies at Benaroya Hall (Seattle), The Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ), The University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Bowling Green State University (OH) and Grand Valley State University (MI).

The Puget Sound Piano Trio is equally at home performing repertoire from the standard classical canon and hot-off-the-press works of living composers. In 2023, the Trio gave the West Coast premiere of Miguel del Aguila's Barroqueada, a neo-Baroque suite infused with Latin-American dances. This became the seed of a program entirely dedicated to Latin-American music for the 2023-24 season, including 21st-century works by Gabriela Ortiz and Alejandro Cardona. The Trio can also be heard on the 2020 Navona Records recording Drift, featuring Tianyi Wang's trio Dark Blessing. That same year, the group commissioned and premiered Robert Hutchinson's When April Woods Are Red for piano trio and mezzo-soprano.

In addition to performing on the concert stage, the Trio is deeply committed to educational outreach. As part of this mission, the ensemble's concert tours are multifaceted in nature, often combining a string of formal concerts with free workshops, masterclasses, and school visits. The Trio's recent visit to Anchorage, an artistic residency sponsored by Alaska Youth Orchestras, included visits to K-12 schools, clinics with the Anchorage Youth Symphony and a feature concert at the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts. The Trio frequently interacts with educational institutions at the collegiate and pre-collegiate levels in its Pacific Northwest home as well as throughout the United States, and passionately believes that music and art should be a part of every child’s education.