Annea Lockwood: The Piano Works
CD / Digital Download (Unsounds)
Xenia Pestova Bennett first discovered the music of Annea Lockwood as a music student at Victoria University of Wellington in the late 1990s. She remembers listening to Red Mesa and reading about Piano Transplants, which she found to be radical, exciting and inspiring.
Sixteen years later, Xenia finally got to meet Annea and talk about the lives, deaths and memories of pianos while working on Piano Burning in North Wales, subsequently learning the complete concert works and realising other Piano Transplants. Piano Garden, one of the Piano Transplants installations, is thriving in Rathmullan, Ireland, where Xenia planted it in 2023. In 2024, she joined composer Catherine Kontz in Luxembourg, playing Cornelius Cardew on a piano which Catherine and Annea 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.
The “indoor” piano works take a similar approach. The composer’s treatment of the instrument requires both the performer and the listener to “walk” with their ears. The piano becomes a collection of sound sources discovered over time through objects and tactile connections, while the placement, timing and repetition of events varies and is modified by the performer in response to the resonance of the instrument and the space it occupies.
This recording marks the culmination of a long collaborative relationship and brings together the complete concert piano works by Lockwood. In the last piece, a transducer speaker inside the instrument transforms and transmutes the pianist’s voice and memory itself in a new version made especially for this project, fed through the resonance of the frame.
Track Listing:
1. Ear-Walking Woman (13:17)
2. Red Mesa (14:45)
3. RCSC (3:24)
4. Ceci n’est pas un piano (10:34)
Order from Unsounds Label (Amsterdam) here.
Album Reviews
“Striking and surprising for the ear… I feel like in that version more than any other I’ve heard, the piano as an instrument emerges in those flashes in the way that it’s played… a hide and seek for the listener and some really animalistic sounds drawn from it… remarkable.”
"…this album is effective because it allows the listener to embrace the sounds as they emerge, and appreciate the world they create as they are brought through it. Pestova Bennett creates a journey through these sounds... each is given space to exist, never crowded, never overindulged…These works are vehicles for shared physical memories of self and of place, whether that of the composer, the performer, the audience it takes on these journeys, or the pianos themselves."
"Die Konzertwerke für Klavier von Annea Lockwood, gespielt von Xenia Pestova Bennett, zu hören, ist ein Geschenk. Unter ihren Händen transformiert sich der Konzertflügel in ein Klanglaboratorium. Mittels diverser Materialien, wie z.B. runde Steine und einer speziellen Präparation, wird die Klaviermusik von Annea Lockwood wortwörtlich zum Klingen gebracht. Selbst nach wiederholtem Hören manifestiert sich ein nachhaltiger Eindruck, der die Attribute „beeindruckend“ und „hörenswert“ in sich vereint."
"L'instrument se prête à la liquéfaction, à des résonances. Il devient cloche (est-ce encore le piano?), portique de cloches. Il gémit, se tapit, à la fois dans des aigus fragiles et des graves percussifs… On assiste à une conférence inédite, les propos de Xenia enveloppés d'un halo insolite, prolongés par le surgissement de voix quasi animales, de résonances telluriques. Le grand piano est devenu dépositaire d'une mémoire qu'il transfigure, charge d'une puissance chamanique."
"...bracing new collection… magnificent prepared piano gem"
"Pestova Bennett takes us on a tactile stroll through a piano’s innards. Bubble wrap, pestles, wooden balls: not tools of sabotage but extensions of listening, each gesture more like echolocation than execution… It's like listening to someone whisper from inside a dream. The line between performer, memory, and material dissolves. The piano becomes a confessional. Or maybe a possessed diary. Either way, it’s deeply intimate and more than a little uncanny.
If 'The Piano Works' teaches us anything, it’s this: the piano is not dead. But it might be buried. Or burning. Or singing your name from the bottom of a pond. And if you listen carefully enough, if you walk with your ears and let go of your habits, it might just answer back."
"...bellissimo album… di musica sicuramente sperimentale, ma davvero magnifica e INTRIGANTE."