ANNEA LOCKWOOD

This album marks the culmination of a long collaborative relationship rooted in a mutual love of exploring piano resonances, and brings together the complete concert piano works by Annea 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 of Ceci N’est Pas Un Piano made especially for this project, fed through the resonance of the frame.

Xenia first discovered the music of Annea Lockwood as an undergraduate 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. Their conversations about music, nature and memory continued over the years in New York, London, Belfast, Peekskill and the two Bangors (Wales and Northern Ireland); while combing the Irish coastline for round rocks to bounce on piano strings and through correspondence.

Piano Garden, one of the Piano Transplants installations, is thriving in Rathmullan, Ireland, where Xenia planted it with great care in 2023. Then, in 2024, she joined composer Catherine Kontz in Luxembourg, playing Cardew on another piano which Catherine and Annea had planted the same year (together with composer Ed Bennett) in a slanted trench in the garden of the European Courts of Justice. 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, savouring an evolving menu of gourmet sounds ranging from the breath-like scuttling of cedar balls on the strings to strident scrapes, percussive strikes and bass roars. 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.

(label info)