Joanna McGregor (amplified piano)
with Django Bates (tenor horn)

Hackney Empire, London 10 July 2005

As the opening event of Hackney's wide-ranging Spice Festival, Joanna McGregor gave an amplified-piano recital of eclectic items, short contrasting pieces drawn substantially from her CD Play, selected to meet the listening preferences of the iPod generation's short attention-span.

She appeared on stage under a low-brimmed hat which must have made it hard to see her music (it was a very hot day, she explained) and began with Byrd's Ashton's Ground played immaculately with neatly turned ornamentation. In the aftermath of London's 7/7 bombing, attendance was understandingly diminished and the several rows of listeners, mostly gathered in the front stalls, had the music thrown at them at a disconcerting and quite unnecessarily high level albeit through high quality sound equipment; nearly distortion free but inevitably not quite so. (My jazz-aficionado companions at the very front thought it all fine, but I was happier after retreating to the back, sitting at a table in front of the bar under the dress circle.)

Friendly contact with the audience was established with informal introductions (via a microphone swung to and fro, of course) and Joanna McGregor had the jazz musician's way of reassuring us that her chosen (contemporary) composers were 'wonderful guys'.

Before six typically tiny and simple (simplistic?) pieces by Howard Skempton (he aspires to write 'the perfect five-second work' - she told us that phone talks with him could last an hour!) Joanna showed us the single page score of Satoh's Incantation II - a sheet of figured harmonic harmonic progressions - and played it with mic-delay.

She told us the story of Nancarrow's exile with his player-piano before making the nearly impossible sound easy; on the CD, she multi-tracks one of his studies which otherwise would need eight hands. There was an evocative Chinese piece with taped sounds recorded in Shanghai, and before finishing with gospel-inspired pieces by Cash & Waites, Bach and Piazolla, an interlude with Django Bates (tenor horn) who lives locally. She departed leaving her audience very happy, including your carping critic!

But for people who had not experienced how a Steinway (deputizing for harpsichord) really sounds, it would have been good to try giving the Byrd Ground and the Bach Allemande with all the machinery switched off, to give the whole a true 'live' perspective? I don't think anyone would have complained or lost concentration.

The very personal compilation Play on Joanna McGregor's own-label CD [Sound Circus SC007] includes much of the above, also demanding piano pieces by Ives and Ligeti, Cage's prepared piano and collaborations with Talvin Singh & Moses Molelekwa. Everything is played immaculately with unassuming virtuosity and tonal subtlety, all captured in ideal sound by engineer Andrea Wright.

Despite my reservations about Joanna McGregor's 'live' concertizing, which is bound to raise older purists' eyebrows, to be applauded is her mission to bring great and diverse musics to new audiences of people who are not regular classical concert-goers.

To satisfy everyone, a DVD next, surely?