Joanna MacGregor (piano)

Anna Magdalena Notebook (exc) - Bach

Triorchic Blues - Gerald Barry

Sonata in C Op 53 (Waldstein) - Beethoven

Three Mazurkas - Chopin

Round Midnight - Monk

Monk's Point - Monk

Out of Doors - Bartok

Joanna MacGregor is a pianist with a purpose. It is this which is her true distinguishing feature, rather than the crossover activities which garner her more media attention. The sterling value of the programme she's taking on her current Music Network tour is actually the long-established one of resourceful programme-building - points of musical contact and distinction well delineated, no fillers, no pandering, everything to her own taste. That taste is not really concerned with good manners and style, as epitomised by, say, the period performance movement. Composer arguments are much more her thing than details of performance practice. Her playing of pieces from Bach's extraordinary teaching collection for his second wife was as fresh as her selection was unhackneyed. Her handling of Gerald Barry's Triorchic Blues transcended the view of this tilted toccata as merely an etude in the control of compacted energy. The opening had something of the presence of a hungry snake slithering through dark grass, the later explosion that leaves the music polarised at either end of the keyboard occasioning a floating, held-back island of rest before the final recovery of energy.

Whether it was in her attempt to recapture the daring and adventure of Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata (the dramatic rests of the slow movement tellingly observed), to reveal a modernist slant in Chopin Mazurkas, or to capture the flurries and twitterings of Bartok's night music with whispering softness, her approach yielded high dividends. The two items by Thelonius Monk didn't quite have the loose-limbed rhythmic feel that a jazz pianist would have brought to them. But that may well have been part of the innovation of presenting them as a sort of bridge to Bartok within this immensely rewarding programme.