New Zealand pianist-composer-improviser Xenia Pestova Bennett plays four “indoor” solo piano compositions of New Zealand-born, American composer and environmental sound explorer Annea Lockwood. Bennett discovered the music of Lockwood as a music student at Victoria University of Wellington in the late 1990s. Sixteen years later, Bennett finally got to meet Annea and talk about the lives, deaths, and memories of pianos while working on Lockwood’s “Outdoor” compositions, such as “Piano Burning” in North Wales in 2013, and subsequently learning the complete concert works and realising other “Piano Transplants” (1967-2005) installation works.
“Piano Garden”, one of the “Piano Transplants” installations, is in Rathmullan, Ireland, where Bennet planted it in 2023. In 2024, Bennett joined composer Catherine Kontz in Luxembourg to play Cornelius Cardew on a piano which Kontz and Lockwood had planted in a slanted trench in the garden of the European Courts of Justice earlier that year. “Piano Garden” opens the instrument to the unpredictable, ongoing ‘preparations’ created by plants, curious animals, and weather.
Bennett worked closely with Lockwood on realizing the “indoor” Piano Works, which were recorded at the Sonic Arts Research
