Pianist Xenia Pestova Bennett presents Luc Ferrari’s rarely-performed masterpiece 36 Enfilades for piano and tape to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the composer’s birth. These witty, virtuosic miniatures are a whirlwind exploration of style, riven with quotations from other composers including Schumann and Brahms.

These pieces are complimented with two works by Annea Lockwood (of Piano Burning fame) to celebrate the composer’s 80th birthday: Red Mesa(1993) and RCSC (2001) as well as music by John Cage.

Xenia Pestova Bennett is an innovative performer and educator. Her commitment and dedication to promoting music by living composers has led her to commission dozens of new works and collaborate with major innovators in contemporary music. Her widely acclaimed recordings of core piano duo works of the Twentieth Century by John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen are available on four CDs for Naxos Records.

Past projects include commissioning and performing in Arlene Sierra’s Urban Birds at the Southbank Centre (with Kathleen Supove and Sarah Nicolls, recorded for BBC Radio 3 and available on NMC Records), burning a piano with Annea Lockwood in Wales, instigating and performing in the World Toy Piano Summit at Festival Rainy Days in Luxembourg (with Margaret Leng Tan and others), designing cutting-edge digital musical instruments at McGill University and collaborating on a new digital version of the analogue electronic processing required for Karlheinz Stockhausen’s epic masterwork Mantra. She is a Schoenhut toy piano concert artist and has championed many new works for this instrument.

Following childhood music education in Western Siberia, Xenia’s studies took place with Judith Clark (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand), Philip Mead and Ian Pace (London), Hakon Austbo (Amsterdam), Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen (Avignon and Paris), Louise Bessette (Montreal) and Sara Laimon at McGill University, where she was awarded a Doctor of Music degree in 2009. She received the unanimous First Prize at the Xavier Montsalvatge International Piano Competition in Girona, Spain and prizes at the Messiaen International Piano Competition in Paris and the KeriKeri National Piano Competition of New Zealand. From 2011-2015 Xenia was the Head of Performance at Bangor University, where she founded and directed the highly successful INTER/actions Festival and Symposium for interactive electronic music. Photo by Dimitri Djuric.