Joanna MacGregor - Biography

Biography

MacGregor grew up in North London, and was educated at home by her Seventh-day Adventist parents until she attended South Hampstead High School at the age of 11. Her mother is a piano teacher who studied at the Royal Academy of Music. Joanna studied music at New Hall, University of Cambridge (1978–81) and was taught by Hugh Wood. After Cambridge, she did a Masters in performance at the Royal Academy of Music, London, with Christopher Elton. She also studied at the Van Cliburn Piano Institute in Texas which included masterclasses with Jorge Bolet.

In the early years of her career, she made a living from writing music for TV. Her first significant break was being selected as an artist for the Young Concert Artists Trust in 1985. Her next major break was a record deal with Collins Classics, with whom she made fifteen recordings. These recordings tend towards 20th century composers such as Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Bartók, Ives, Messaien, Birtwistle, Britten and Hugh Wood. There are also recordings of Bach and Scarlatti.

She has performed in over sixty countries often appearing as a solo artist with many of the world's leading orchestras. These include the New York Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra and Sydney Symphony, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The conductors with whom she has worked include Pierre Boulez, Sir Simon Rattle, Sir Colin Davis and Michael Tilson Thomas. She has premiered many compositions ranging from Sir Harrison Birtwistle and Django Bates to John Adams and James MacMillan. In 1997 she gave an unusual performance of Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 2 at London's St John's, Smith Square, with a brass band, The Marple Band, as part of the European Brass Band Championships. She has toured South Africa with jazz artist Moses Molelekwa, recorded with pop artist Talvin Singh and toured China (with her own music combining traditional Chinese instruments and electronics) with Jin Xing's Contemporary Dance Theatre of Shanghai.

On 20 May 1990, The BBC broadcast a radio play that she wrote entitled Memoirs of an Amnesiac about the life of Eric Satie. It was nominated for the Prix Italia, a prestigious radio award. In September 1991 her musical adaptation of The Caucasian Chalk Circle was performed at the Unicorn Theatre.

She organised the Platform Festival of New Music from 1991 until 1993. This included an eight-day festival at the Arts Theatre in Great Newport Street in 1991 which featured performers Simon Limbrick and the Norwegian cellist, Øystein Birkeland, and composers ranging from Paul Kellett (The Birth of Liquid Desires 2 "eight minutes of wildness" for 13 cellos) to the George Crumb.

Between 1997 and 2000, she was Professor of Music at Gresham College, London, giving free public lectures. She has received honorary Professorships and Fellowships from the Royal Academy of Music and Trinity College of Music and an Honorary Doctorate from the Open University. MacGregor was appointed as Member of the Arts Council England in 1998 alongside Anish Kapoor, Brian McMaster, and Andrew Motion. She resigned in 2004.

MacGregor was the subject of an edition of The South Bank Show in December 2001. She also presented her own series entitled Strings, Bows, and Bellows for BBC Television.

She made her conducting début in 2002 and regularly directs her own orchestral projects. She has had a very close artistic partnership as conductor and performer with the Britten Sinfonia for the past ten years.

In 2005, she was appointed as Artistic Director of the Bath International Music Festival. The climax of the festival was a programme of renaissance and electronic music with herself, Brian Eno and the Bath Camerata in Bath Abbey.

In 2010 she curated Deloitte Ignite, a three day festival celebrating the opening of the season at London's Royal Opera House. A series of installations and performances with an arboreal theme were available to members of the public for free during the daytimes, with three ticketed evening concerts, including the 'Lying Down Concert' which featured Joanna MacGregor, Kiki Dale and Ilona Jantti.

She was appointed Head of Keyboard at the Royal Academy of Music in November 2010, taking up the role from September 2011.