Joanna MacGregor
This is Joanna MacGregor's fifth year as Artistic Director. As a pianist she enjoyed performing at the Music Festival many times before taking up the reins, playing music ranging across jazz, world and classical. Her programming reflects her interest in all kinds of music, and inspiring collaborations - bringing musicians together with contemporary art and multimedia, poetry and storytelling.
Joanna is thought of as one of the world's most wide-ranging and innovative musicians and has pursued a life connecting many genres of music defying categorizations. 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, London and Sydney Symphony Orchestras, Netherlands Radio and Oslo Philharmonic Orchestras and Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The many eminent conductors with whom she has worked include Pierre Boulez, Sir Simon Rattle, Sir Colin Davis and Michael Tilson Thomas. She has premiered many landmark compositions ranging from Sir Harrison Birtwistle and Django Bates to John Adams and James MacMillan.
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 the past ten 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.
As a recording artist Joanna has made 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. Later on this year she releases a recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations, made at the Mozarteum in Salzburg.
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.