Xenia Pestova Bennett: All Aglow for piano, electronics and projection [19:00, 18/10/2023]

When: 19:00-20:00, 18/10/2023
Where: ECA West Court, 74 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh
What: A concert for solo piano, electronics and projection
UNESCO Week of Sound events are free, book a ticket.

All Aglow is an exquisite solo project that explores resonance and improvisation to portray the effects of bioluminescence (a range of glowing behaviours exhibited by marine life and bacteria) in coastal sea waters. In ‘All Aglow’, Xenia combines her concert pianist pedigree with her unique compositional voice, to create a nostalgic sound world filled with piano, voice, analogue synthesizers, and objects reclaimed from the sea. For this live performance, the piano is prepared with objects gently inserted and placed to vibrate on the strings, while synthesizers, seascape recordings, interviews and poetic texts create an atmosphere awash with mystery. The result is a genre-bending sonic gem, full of reflection, drift and storytelling. 

Xenia’s notes about All Aglow:

• 1. A Sea of Milky White
• 2. Iridescence
• 3. By Torchlight
• 4. And it was late at night
• 5. Tapetum lucidum
• 6. Reflection Echoes
• 7. Plastic Dulcimer
• 8. Everything else around you
• 9. Breath of the Ocean
• 10. A Marginal Sea 

For the last few years I’ve been living in a house overlooking the Belfast Lough. According to some, it used to belong to a sea captain. On clear days, Scotland is just across the water with hills and wind turbines. The sound and smell of the sea is constant. Storms throw down tree branches and fling salt onto the windows. There are the birds: plump eiders, redshanks, oyster catchers, shags, guillemots, corvids and gulls dropping mollusk shells onto the rocks to get at the tender flesh inside. There are rock pools, crabs, limpets, snails; sea vegetables: dulce, sea radish, scurvy grass. Seals sunbathe and curve their tails into the air, sometimes, you see little sea otters. Container ships huddle in the bay to wait out storms, their lights gleaming in the night. There’s our little cove and the submerged cave, waves churning, swimming in all seasons and weathers, starfish gleaming from the depths below, a whole unknown forest beneath the surface. Then, the beach: full of plastic, glass, golf balls, lighters, toys, bottles, and depending on rainfall, toilet paper.

The sea permeates this piece – it is there and not there at the same time. Loosely based on human experiences with the sea and marine bioluminescence, All Aglow is also a reflection on our impact on the environment. Plastic salvaged from the seashore is used to prepare the piano and muffle its sound, ultimately silencing its voice.

Voices, quotations and texts by:

About Xenia

Xenia Pestova Bennett is an innovative performer and educator. Described as “a powerhouse of contemporary keyboard repertoire” (Tempo), “stunning” (Wales Arts Review), “ravishing” (Pizzicato) and “remarkably sensuous” (New Zealand Herald) in the international press, she has earned a reputation as a leading interpreter of uncompromising repertoire alongside masterpieces from the past.

Xenia’s own compositions are available on Diatribe Records and TakuRoku. Her full-length album “Atomic Legacies” features the Ligeti Quartet and the Magnetic Resonator Piano. Highlighted in Bandcamp’s “Best of Contemporary Classical” in 2020, the album was described as “boldly conceived and brilliantly realised… a foretaste of things to come” in The Wire, “intoxicating, extraordinarily eerie and evocative” (Bernard Clarke, RTE LyricFM), “melancholy… heart-swells and proper feelings” (The Quietus) and “a nuclear musical reaction that produces that great, irradiated beauty” (Tom Service, BBC Radio 3). Xenia’s subsequent digital EP “Atonal Electronic Chamber Music for Cats” takes an unexpected turn-around, using vintage synthesizers in an exploration of 1990’s techno-art-pop nostalgia. xeniapestovabennett.com