(modern creative) [WEB] Joanna MacGregor - Sidewalk Dances (Fourteen Moondog Pieces) (2006) - 2015, FLAC (tracks), lossless

Joanna MacGregor is one of the world’s most innovative musicians, appearing as a concert pianist, curator and collaborator. Head of Piano at the Royal Academy of Music and Professor of the University of London, Joanna MacGregor is also the Artistic Director of Dartington International Summer School.
As a solo artist Joanna has performed in over seventy countries and appeared with many of the world’s leading orchestras, with such eminent conductors as Pierre Boulez, Sir Colin Davis, Valery Gergiev, Sir Simon Rattle and Michael Tilson Thomas, and has premiered many landmark compositions ranging from Sir Harrison Birtwistle and Django Bates to John Adams and James MacMillan. She made three appearances at the 2012 BBC Proms, two of them televised (including Hugh Wood’s Piano Concerto and Messiaen’s Turangalîla), and made her debut at the Mostly Mozart Festival in Lincoln Center, New York in 2012. Known for her interpretations of Bach, in April 2013 she was invited by Sir John Eliot Gardner to perform the Goldberg Variations at the Royal Albert Hall, broadcast live. She made her debut at Leipzig Gewandhaus in June 2013, and returned in December to perform Britten’s Piano Concerto for his centenary celebrations. The current season also includes performances at the Wigmore Hall, Sydney Opera House and the Bimhuis in Amsterdam, as well as tours of Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
Joanna MacGregor made her conducting debut in 2002 and has solo-directed concerts with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Liverpool Philharmonic, Manchester Camerata and the Hallé, and has enjoyed a close artistic partnership with Britten Sinfonia for more than fifteen years. Amongst the many and varied artists with whom she has collaborated are jazz artist Moses Molelekwa, pop artist and tabla player Talvin Singh, Brian Eno, folk artist Kathryn Tickell, jazz saxophonist Andy Sheppard and Arabic singer and oud virtuoso Dhafer Youssef.
Multimedia is of great interest to Joanna MacGregor, and in 2003 she toured China with Crossborder; created with Jin Xing’s Contemporary Dance Theatre of Shanghai, it combined Chinese traditional music with computer technology and film.
Joanna MacGregor was Artistic Director of the Bath International Music Festival 2006-2012, and curated the multi-arts Deloitte Ignite Festival at the Royal Opera House in 2010, as well as Aventures, an orchestral series for Luxembourg Philharmonie, 2012-13. For Bath Festival in 2007 she curated the installation On The Edge of Life, a multimedia collaboration between paediatricians, artists and musicians, examining premature birth. This became an annual event, and in 2008 the series examined the impact of homelessness and in 2009 child human rights through the prism of fairytales with cultural historian Marina Warner. Deloitte Ignite 2010 at the Royal Opera House included many new art commissions, including a year-long installation by the remarkable artist Alice Anderson.
As a recording artist Joanna MacGregor is a veteran of over 30 solo recordings, ranging from Bach, Scarlatti, Ravel and Debussy, to jazz and John Cage. Her own record label SoundCircus was founded in 1998 and has released many highly successful recordings, including the Mercury Prize-nominated Play and Neural Circuits, with Nitin Sawhney. Other 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. Live in Buenos Aires, Bach’s Goldberg Variations (recorded at the Mozarteum in Salzburg) and a four-CD Messiaen set were released in 2010 by Warner Classical and Jazz, in partnership with SoundCircus label. Seven further double CDs were released in 2011.
Joanna MacGregor is Professor of Performance at Liverpool Hope University; she has received Honorary Fellowships from the Royal Academy of Music, Trinity College of Music and Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, as well as Honorary Doctorates from Bath University, Bath Spa University and the Open University. From 1997-2000 she was Professor of Music at Gresham College, London where she gave a series of public lectures. She was the subject of a South Bank show in 2002; and her ongoing series of music books, PianoWorld has been hailed as ‘a new series for the Millenium’.
Joanna MacGregor was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the Queen’s Jubilee Honours in 2012.

Even by the norms of a tradition largely defined by its great individualists, Louis Thomas Hardin (1916-99), who called himself Moondog, was a singular figure in American music. Blind from the age of 16, Moondog spent most of his adult life living rough and performing on the streets of New York, and using what little money he earned to have his scores copied and to make recordings. He knew the leading jazz musicians of the 1950s such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and he has been hailed as one of the precursors of minimalism, but in many ways his music, with its obsessive use of canon, belongs to a very different iconoclastic tradition, one closer to composers such as Carl Ruggles and Harry Partch.
Over the past few years, Joanna MacGregor has become a champion of Moondog's works, and her arrangements of his pieces for the Britten Sinfonia, with saxophonist Andy Sheppard and tabla-player Kuljit Bhamra, are an honest attempt to make the music available to a wider audience. But something has been lost in the process: MacGregor has removed the raw edge from Moondog's music, and some of the tautness, too; it all sounds rather comfortable, as if she's trying a bit too hard to please everyone.

Bass – Neville Malcolm
Conductor, Piano, Harpsichord – Joanna MacGregor
Drums, Percussion – Seb Rochford
Harpsichord – Joanna MacGregor
Indian Flute – Shri Sriram
Orchestra – Britten Sinfonia
Soprano Saxophone, Tenor Saxophone – Andy Sheppard
Tabla, Percussion, Vocals – Kuljit Bhamra