BAILE/home
Where is home? For millions of displaced people, this question is becoming increasingly difficult to answer. Home can be a place of nurture, safety, and ancestral roots, or a place of oppression, lack of opportunity, and loss. Homes can be lost but also found, regained, rediscovered, and made anew.
In this performance, renowned historical keyboard specialist Yonit Kosovske, violinist Angharad Davies and boundary-exploring pianist and composer Xenia Pestova Bennett join forces to give a home to new music that combines contemporary and historical instruments. The set-up creates a striking visual arrangement and draws listeners into sounds both old and new, humorous and serious, reflective and progressive.
Xenia Pestova Bennett’s new piece BAILE/home brings together stories of migration, memory, and (be)longing with text, field recordings and early music instruments and will be placed in context with contemporary and historical repertoire. The performers gratefully acknowledge support from the PRS Foundation Beyond Borders scheme on this tour in collaboration with H.I.P.S.T.E.R., Historically Informed Performance Series, Teaching, Education and Research.
Ensemble performer bios:
Angharad Davies works at the thresholds of improvisation, composition, and experimental music, approaching sound through attentive listening and pushing beyond the sonic confines of her instrument and classical training. An intrepid collaborator, she has worked with Tony Conrad, Eliane Radigue, Tarek Atoui, Gwenno, Jürg Frey, Lina Lapelyte, Richard Dawson, Rie Nakajima, JG Thirlwell, and Annea Lockwood, and as a composer has received commissions from Counterflows, LCMF, Tŷ Cerdd, Nawr, Explore Ensemble, GBSR Duo at HCMF, AndPLAY, Rainy Days, and the duo of Heather Roche with Dominic Lash, with over 100 releases to her name.
Yonit Kosovske performs as a soloist, chamber musician, accompanist, and interdisciplinary artist on modern piano, fortepiano, harpsichord, clavichord, and chamber organ. Recognized for her creative curation and imaginative programming, she specialises in repertoire from the 16th century through Contemporary, regularly championing music outside of the mainstream canon of Classical Western Art Music. She has collaborated with many composers, singers, instrumentalists, choral ensembles, and orchestras. Yonit has commissioned several new chamber works, among them Baile by Xenia Pestova Bennett, Watershed by Ailís Ní Ríain, and Alchemy by Tal Arbel, among others. In 2026 she will record and release Apricity, an album of Contemporary music for solo & collaborative harpsichord. Yonit has also created, directed, and performed in projects made for screen, including Rocking, The Judith Project, Susanna, Triple Spiral, Seams In My Socks, Keening, and Litany. In 2024 she collaborated on Inventions: The Harpsichord Across Time and Borders, a transnational composition and harpsichord project directed by Janet Oates. Yonit is founding Co-director of the annual Limerick Early Music Festival and year-round series H.I.P.S.T.E.R. (Historically Informed Performance Series, Teaching, Education, and Research), as well as founding Artistic Director of Wave~Links, a video documentary series exploring modalities between music-making and artisanry. Yonit is an Associate Professor in Music at the University of Limerick, Irish World Academy of Music and Dance. She holds a Doctor of Music from Indiana University, a Master of Music from San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and a Bachelor of Music from Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts.
Pianist, composer and improviser Xenia Pestova Bennett has earned an international reputation as a leading proponent of uncompromising music. Her work spans a wide range of sound worlds, styles and genres from classical and contemporary art music to free improvisation, experimental electronica, multimedia and avant-pop. Xenia’s commitment to contemporary music inspired her to commission dozens of new works and collaborate closely with major innovators including Annea Lockwood, Karlheinz Essl and Gayle Young as well as champion numerous new voices. As a composer, Xenia is represented by the Contemporary Music Centre Ireland. Her ten studio albums to date include widely acclaimed recordings of core piano duo works by John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen with Pascal Meyer for Naxos Records, collaborations with singer-songwriter Roxanne De Bastion and guitarist / producer Simon Tong (“The Piano Player of Budapest”), a collection of premiere recordings “Shadow Piano” for piano, toy piano and electronics (a “terrific album of dark, probing music”, Peter Margasak, Chicago Reader), complete piano works by Gayle Young hailed as "a triumph" (John Eyles, All About Jazz), and "Gold.Berg.Werk", a reimagining of J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations by Karlheinz Essl described as "a sci-fi journey in the direction of 1741” (Luke Clancy, RTE Lyric FM).
Image credit: Charlie McGeever.
