Irina Knaster is the Founder and Artistic Director of Aspect Chamber Music Series, a non-profit organization established in London in 2011 and expanded to New York in 2016. Irina's background and education are richly varied: she has a degree in Piano Performance (former USSR), another in English Literature (USA), and a third in Law (USA), which she put to use in ten years of international corporate law practice. However, it was a Master's in History of Art (UK) that translated into the impulse to create Aspect: her newly acquired cultural-historical perspective crystallized her existing belief that while music speaks for itself, our perception of it can be enhanced if we understand more about its history and context. It was then that Irina set herself the goal of creating a concert series that would explore aspects of music overlooked by the traditional recital, appealing not just to connoisseurs of classical music but to a wider audience as well.

This led to her developing Music in Context, a novel concert format in which performances are combined with illustrated lectures. Every work programmed is examined through the prism of art, history, literature, and ideas and philosophies of its time. Musicians and speakers delve into composers' lives and times, considering the historical circumstances of the works they wrote and the connections between their music and other contemporary forms of artistic expression. This might mean, for example, looking at Rameau in the context of the intellectual milieu of eighteenth-century Paris, Schumann's influence on Fauré, or the ways in which Proust was inspired by the music of Saint-Saëns and Franck.

Irina has dedicated the last twelve years of her life to developing Aspect. She has cultivated an international network of musicians, collaborates with prominent writers, musicologists, and cultural historians who regularly contribute to Aspect's programming, creates and curates programs, and, together with Irina Gandshu, the organization's indispensable Production Director, supervises every aspect of its operations. In its seven years in New York, Aspect has become one of the city's finest and most respected music institutions, transforming the traditional recital into an intimate, engaging, and thought-provoking experience.