Let us begin by setting one piano on fire. Then bury another one in a slanted trench. Water a third. Let animals nibble on its strings, let the wind play its octaves, let moss grow between its damp hammers. Eventually, of course, someone will try to "play" it. That someone, in this case, is Xenia Pestova Bennett - and what she does on "The Piano Works" is less a performance and more a conjuring of lost voices, rusted memory, and the gentle madness that comes from talking to pianos as if they were old friends with secrets.

Annea Lockwood, composer of these works and an unapologetic saboteur of sonic norms, has spent decades lovingly dismantling what we thought we knew about the piano. No longer a mere box of tempered expectations, her instrument becomes a wilderness of textures - rubbed, scraped, struck, whispered into. And Pestova Bennett is the ideal medium for this séance: not just a pianist, but a sonic gardener, coaxing strange blossoms from familiar soil.

Let’s walk through the pieces. And I mean that literally - Lockwood asks us to "ear-walk". In the titular "Ear-Walking Woman", 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 as if the piano has turned into a percussive forest floor and she’s barefoot, alert, reverent, and slightly amused.

"Red Mesa", inspired by a solitary desert journey in the American Southwest, is dust and bone rendered in resonance. Pestova Bennett lets silence stretch just long enough to make you check if your speakers are still working. Then - bam - a brittle chord like a hawk shadow. The mesa speaks. Its cliffs remember. You begin to feel that the real performer here is the land itself; the pianist, once again, becomes interpreter rather than protagonist.

Then comes "RCSC", a short homage to Ruth Crawford Seeger via a ten-note row, which in Lockwood’s hands is less serialism and more séance. Pestova Bennett doesn’t so much “play” it as carve it delicately into space, like someone carefully spelling out a name on an ancient wall with a soft brush. Blink and you’ll miss it, but those three minutes leave an aftertaste like cold iron or antique ink.

Finally, "Ceci n’est pas un piano" - and no, Magritte isn’t rolling in his grave, he’s winking from it. This piece is meta to the marrow: it includes Pestova Bennett’s own recorded voice, speaking of her hands, her memories, her pianos, all fed back into the instrument via a transducer, so her voice is heard through the body of the piano itself. 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.

What’s most striking about this release is how personal it feels - not in the “this-is-my-breakup-album” way, but in the way a walk through a childhood attic is personal. Pestova Bennett brings Lockwood’s works to life not with academic stiffness or avant-garde severity, but with a curiosity that borders on mischievous reverence. You can almost hear her smiling between the notes, not because the music is funny (although it sometimes is), but because it "matters".

There’s a kind of beautiful anti-virtuosity at play here. Yes, Pestova Bennett has the technique to melt a Rachmaninoff concerto into her morning coffee. But she’s not showing off. She’s listening. She’s letting the piano breathe weird air, grow mold, gossip with insects. She’s letting Lockwood’s sonic philosophy - of decay as transformation, of gesture as ecology - radiate in slow, unpredictable pulses.

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. In strange timbres. In old stories. In blissful rust.
And maybe - just maybe - it will laugh with you, too.