Joanna MacGregor
2011 will be Joanna MacGregor's sixth year as Artistic Director. As a pianist she had enjoyed performing at the MusicFest many times before taking up the reins, playing music ranging from jazz and world to classical. Her programming reflects her interest in all genres of music, and often inspires brand-new collaborations: bringing musicians together with contemporary art and multimedia, poetry, storytelling and film, and reaching out to as a wide an audience as possible.
Joanna is regarded as one of the world's most wide-ranging and innovative musicians. In September 2011 she takes up her appointment as Head of Keyboard at the prestigious Royal Academy of Music; and she curated, to great acclaim, Deloitte Ignite 2010 Festival at the Royal Opera House. She has performed in over seventy countries, often appearing as a solo artist with many of the world’s leading orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, Netherlands Radio and Oslo Philharmonic Orchestras and Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She has worked with many eminent conductors – Pierre Boulez, Sir Colin Davis, Sir Simon Rattle and Michael Tilson Thomas amongst them – and has premiered many landmark compositions ranging from Sir Harrison Birtwistle and Django Bates to John Adams and James MacMillan. In May 2010 she gave two acclaimed performances of Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra and Valery Gergiev.
Joanna made her conducting debut in 2002 and regularly directs her own orchestral projects, including an all-Mozart programme with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and Bach with the Hallé. She has had a close artistic partnership as conductor and performer with the Britten Sinfonia for fifteen years; her programmes with them range from classical music, to new collaborations with jazz and world musicians. She has toured South Africa with jazz artist Moses Molelekwa, recorded with pop artist and tabla player Talvin Singh, and opened the 2008 London Jazz Festival with a collaboration between Arabic singer and oud virtuoso Dhafer Youssef and Britten Sinfonia, hailed by The Times as 'the future of music'. Joanna often works alongside other artists in mixed media. In 2003 she created Crossborder, touring China with Jin Xing's Contemporary Dance Theatre of Shanghai (for which she wrote a new score combining Chinese traditional music with computer technology and film).
In 2007 she first curated the multimedia installation On The Edge of Life for the Festival, which has become an important strand in the programming. The first year saw a collaboration between paediatricians, artists and musicians, examining premature birth; 2008 explored homelessness, with the participation of local charities Genesis, Julian House and Wood Works. 2009's On the Edge of Life reflected on adoption, fostering and child rights in the guise of Fairytales, with the guidance of world-renowned cultural historian Marina Warner, and in 2010 the project looked at War.
As a recording artist Joanna is a veteran of over 30 solo recordings, ranging from Bach, Scarlatti, Ravel and Debussy, to jazz and contemporary music. Her own record label SoundCircus was founded in 1998 and has released many highly successful recordings including the Mercury prize-nominated Play (including music by Bach, Ligeti and Piazzolla) and Neural Circuits, with music by Messiaen, Arvo Pärt and Nitin Sawhney. Current releases include Sidewalk Dances - music by the New York street musician Moondog - and Deep River, music inspired by the Deep South, with saxophonist Andy Sheppard. This year Live in Buenos Aires and Bach’s Goldberg’s Variations, recorded at the Mozarteum at Salzburg, were released by Warner Classical and Jazz, now in partnership with the world-wide distribution of SoundCircus label, followed by a four-CD Messiaen set. Seven further double CDs will be released this year.
Joanna MacGregor holds Professorships at Liverpool Hope University and the Royal College of Art, has written a series of music books for young children (PianoWorld) and has received honorary Fellowships from the Royal Academy of Music, Trinity College of Music and New Hall, Cambridge, as well as Honorary Doctorates from the Open University and, she's delighted to say, Bath University.