Broad Church Musician

THE abiding impression Joanna MacGregor creates is of free-spirited independence. There's the fact that she's managed the feat, which so many young pianists seem to regard as impossible, of establishing a career and reputation without the crutch of international competitions. Never mind winning one, she never even entered one.

Her repertoire is wide and eclectic with the concentration falling on either side of the standard fare of the 19th century. Her representation on CD skips forward from Bach and Scarlatti to Satie, Bartok and Debussy, and then through Gershwin and Broadway to Messiaen and beyond into our own time. Her latest CD links mathematical obsessions of the 18th and 20th centuries by coupling Bach's Art Of Fugue with works by the American composer Conlon Nancarrow, who has spent most of his life in Mexican exile writing pieces of fierce rhythmic complexity for player pianos.

And though she still refuses to learn the Tchaikovsky concerto (simply because she doesn't like it) MacGregor is what you might call a broad church musician, active in the field of jazz and keen to quiz me, when we met in London about any Irish composers who were actively involved in making music in multi-media contexts.

Foregoing competitions is something she has no regrets about, not remotely, not at all". The decision, she says, "was only hard insofar as it was an unusual decision to take. Taking that kind of decision in isolation when you're 22 is not very easy. I was told over and over again, it is the only way to be a pianist. But I consciously avoided it, because I knew exactly what they required - I think they were more rigid then than they are now.

"I knew that I didn't have those qualities of, `Here is my Haydn sonata, it's very, very nice. Here's a couple of Chopin Etudes, aren't my fingers good? Now I'm going to play Beethoven in a very inoffensive manner'. Twenty-two was when I was starting to play Charles Ives and contemporary music. It was that direction I was taking and there wasn't a place for me in the competition system. I took the much slower route of teaching and writing and practising and hoping that one day some concerts would come along.

"I also think that competitions are quite traumatic, even if you do well in them." She mentions eases of people burnt out by the heavy exposure in the wake of competition success. "I was aware of this and of the stresses and strains. There's also a bit of a streak in me . . . I remember once somebody saying to me, `If you're a young pianist, you've got to jump through hoops, I know it's unfair, but you've got to do it. And I always thought ,`Why the hell should I? Ill jump through hoops when I want to'."

This was an attitude held partly in a spirit of rebellion, but governed also by a very strong sense of who I was quite young, and knowing what I wanted to do and that a lot of grief awaited me if I tried to conform to what the competitions required. Looking back, I realise I had absolutely nothing to back me up. It was a rather foolhardy decision, then, but that's what I did."

Given the balances of her performing career, it's hardly surprising that she feels that the problem with competitions is "that you end up with the least offensive person. That's OK up to a point, but it's not a reflection of what happens in the real world. In the real world you have musicians who are volatile and difficult and interesting, and sometimes, you like them, sometimes you hate them.

All of the time that might have been spent preparing for competitions was put to other uses. "I used that time to learn the repertoire that I hadn't been able to learn as a student, some late 20th-century repertoire, and learning to work with living composers, meeting them, learning how to cope with all that, how to make sense of the scores. I wrote a lot of music, too, at that time.

"But my big break was auditioning for YCAT, the Young Concert Artists Trust, an agency that represents young artists. They took me on when I was 25 and represented me for three years. That was fantastic, because it meant that I got work. It was all very tiny, playing in village halls and arts centres. But it meant that I had regular playing experience and learned how to cope with different sized halls, different audiences, different pianos. I can't imagine any other way of learning how to become a performer.

THE London-based YCAT interestingly, is a body that has benefitted quite a number of Irish performers, among them Regina Nathan, Franzita Whelan - and, most recently, when the jury was chaired by Joanna MacGregor, the Belfast soprano Mary Nelson. MacGregor's irregular career path included the decision to put university before music college, and while at Cambridge she studied composition with Hugh Wood.

I met a few composers there, and I'd always written since I was a kid. The thing was, I knocked around with musicians who were very much on the fringes and played wild new music, and I think I just picked it up from them. I met composers through them. Then it became part of my mainstream work, always to be having something written or to be premiering something, enabling situations where commissions can happen.

Next week in Bantry, Joanna MacGregor will be heard in five of the concerts at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival. She plays excerpts from Messiaen's Vingt regards sur l'enfant Jesus, Shostakovich's E minor Piano Trio and G minor Piano Quintet, and also (in what are, for her, first performing encounters), the Horn Quartet by Robert Simpson and Schubert's Trout quintet.

Chamber music seems to be something of a luxury in her work schedule, the pianist's isolation - which prevails in the preparation of both recitals and concertos - being the norm. "Totellyouthetruth" she says about ensemble playing, I've tended to with jazz players much more, if collaborations have happened. I've hooked up with people like Django Bates and Human Chain Joseph and Andy Sheppard. . That's my, chamber music, generally. Maybe there's a novel opening there for developing next yearns Bantry festival in some unexpected directions.