If she finds it, she plays it

Outside the window of the cafe on Liverpool's Albert Dock, fierce grey winds sweep the surface off the water and fling it in fistfuls against the glass. Inside, wrapped in a black polo-neck and leather jacket and attacking a tankard full of hot chocolate topped with a mountain of cream, Liverpool resident Joanna MacGregor is talking up a storm of her own, which is hardly surprising, given that she has hit the classical music scene like the proverbial whirlwind. She's 40, but doesn't look it. She's a model pianist with an impeccable mainstream training, but she certainly doesn't act it.

More beau monde than bow tie, she plays Thelonius Monk alongside Bach, Beethoven and Gerald Barry; she collaborates effortlessly with jazz composers such as Django Bates and dance artists such as Talvin Singh; and has set up her own record label, SoundCircus, turning out CDs so sleek and stylish they could persuade a convention of Orbital devotees that contemporary classical music is cool.

It's not so much that MacGregor breaks barriers, as that she refuses to recognise that they exist - she's adamant that for anyone whose record collection includes a bit of jazz, a bit of world music, a couple of dance CDs and the occasional new rock album, contemporary classical music is an absolute doddle. But she must, surely, have started off playing the sort of Bach/Beethoven/Chopin recitals which are the bread and butter of the classical music world? "No, I never did. I never did play straight mainstream stuff.

On the other hand I don't want to have a reputation for just playing new music; I play lots and lots of Grieg, Beethoven, all kinds of things. But not Tchaikovsky.

That's the one thing - Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto - I never wanted to play. "When I was 27 and Young Concert Artists Trust took over my management, they said `there's two things you've got to do: one is, pin your hair back, the other is, learn Tchaikovsky One. I didn't pin my hair back, and I never did learn that piece.

Why play that, when you could be playing Beethoven Four or a Bach concerto or James MacMillan's concerto, or something - or the Ligeti, which I've got to learn for next year, which is really, really hard . . . ?"

The eclecticism, in any case, predates her formal musical studies. She and her two siblings were educated at home until they were 11 years old - "my mother would give me some problems, maths or whatever it was, and tell me to come back when I'd worked it out. It never occurred to me to think it was strange" - and musically, it was a magpie household.

"My parents were big Beatles fans; I grew up with Marc Bolan and Alice Cooper and all those 1970s things that are being revived now; my mother was a big fan of people like Oscar Peterson and Louis Armstrong, and then my dad bought me a record of Thelonius Monk when I was quite young." All of this she imbibed, then regurgitated on the piano. "I played everything by ear.

I played pop songs by ear. I played jazz by ear. Everybody does, don't they? Classical people just don't own up to it - to not do it, I think, would be really odd. Like classical musicians who claim not to have listened to pop music when they're young. I think that's just weird."

Her interest in jazz is telling. At one stage in 20th-century musical history there were high hopes that jazz and classical music would fuse together to create a new way forward. It never happened, though. Why does she think that is? "I think you ought to ask a jazz musician that question, because I think they'd be a bit more bitter about it.

There's a huge disparity between how much classical musicians get paid and how much jazz musicians get paid, for a start - it's shocking how little very famous jazz musicians are paid, which makes me think that the promoters of festivals and so on just don't take jazz as seriously. "As far as fusion is concerned, what we haven't got is people who are trained to play in both styles.

I was involved in a concert recently where the orchestra played Duke Ellington's orchestral pieces - a very famous orchestra, but they didn't play them very well. They really didn't know how to play them. And I think that's a big stumbling block. It's to do with the narrowness of musical training." And the weight of classical tradition - which, she says, people in the business tend to hide behind, when it suits them.

"It's still quite a fight to have contemporary music taken seriously by teachers who are teaching instruments at an incredibly high level. They let their students play one or two contemporary pieces, but the rest is standard competition repertoire - so if you then start talking about getting jazz accepted, and other musics . . . well, you can see the problem."

Go to any symphony concert and work out the average age of the audience, and you see another problem. "Symphony orchestras have to wake up in a big way - they've got to look really intelligently at what they're doing. I don't know why they don't invest more in young audiences. There's already a lost generation; the people who go to concerts are 50 and above, so you've already lost the 20 and 30-year-olds - but to me, that's the very reason to be investing in regular children's concerts. And not just the odd one. It should be as important as the regular season, with free tickets for children and all the rest."

If anyone is likely to appeal to younger audiences, of course, it's MacGregor herself, with her interest in the wider world of percussion instruments, African music, and Talvin Singh and his tablas. "Oh, I'm mad about percussion. When you play John Cage's music for prepared piano, what you do essentially is turn the piano into a gamelan.

You put little bits of wood and brass bolts and pieces of rubber and plastic in between the strings - there's a chart at the beginning of the music which shows you exactly where everything goes, and how many inches up the string it goes. It's very precise. You have to measure it out and be very patient - and also, all pianos are different inside so you have to kind of fiddle around and make sure the thing isn't gonna spring out when you start playing."

Hang on a second, now - John Cage? Isn't he, well, difficult to listen to? "Cage? Oh, no, he's lovely. It's very melodic music; and it's very New Agey now as well. It was very shocking for all kinds of reasons in the 1940s and 1950s, like his piece of silence, 4' 33", which was - a bit like Jackson Pollock, really - people thought it was an insult to their intelligence. Now we're saying, `yeah, I get this'. And it's very Beethoven, anyway, because Beethoven was the first composer to actually write bars of silence with significant pauses over them."

MacGregor's messianic approach to Cage's silences led to his being the main man on one of the first releases to appear on her groundbreaking SoundCircus label. She asked a range of musicians to produce responses to 4'33" - and came up, among other things, with a clubby offering from her students at Liverpool's Hope University, a typically out-there chunk of Talvin Singh, and a cool slice of jazz by the hot young pianist and composer Nikki Yeoh.

Cage himself features in MacGregor's performance of his Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano. With their hip mix of musics, their superslim book-shaped format and their occasional fragments of recorded interviews or rehearsal high jinks, SoundCircus CDs neither look nor sound like traditional CDs, a deliberate ploy by MacGregor, who doesn't want them filed away under "difficult classical stuff" either in record shops or people's homes - and is selling them at gigs, rock-star style, and on the Internet, to avoid stereotyping. Superbly understated designs and bright, illuminating soundbites on each piece add to the ambience and help provide listeners with a way in to the music.

"It's very important to me, that, giving people a way in - I've thought long and hard about this, because I do understand what you're saying about John Cage being difficult to listen to, and everything. Contemporary music hasn't been kind to itself in the way it has presented itself - it has been very off-putting, don't you think? Rather grey and austere and saying `you need several PhDs before you can come near this'. Which is a great shame, because I think it's some of the most exciting music I've ever heard."

MacGregor's approach to new music is refreshing and persuasive. If she finds it, she plays it; if she doesn't find it, she commissions it. Sometimes this involves improvisation with a colleague from the jazz side of the tracks, such as Django Bates, with whom she has been working for over a decade; sometimes it involves being handed a composer's finished manuscript and told, "play this". She claims to enjoy both - although sometimes the latter course isn't quite as straightforward as it might sound.

"I recently premiered some new pieces by Harrison Birtwhistle, who has got quite a reputation for just writing the piece and presenting it to you - but actually this was the first time he had written a set of piano solo pieces, and we changed lots of things. It's often a question of the notation not being precise enough for them to tell you what they want. So you sort of have to ask them, `Is that really how you want it?' And they go `Ooooh, no . . . ' and look rather shocked and hurt. And you say, `well that's what you've written, so whaddya want?' "

Refusing to accept that new music is difficult is one thing; making a judgment about what's good and what's not so good is another matter. "I've got a sort of gut instinct now - I think a good way to tell if somebody's music is interesting is if they're an interesting person, alive to the world, because then they're more likely to be an interesting musician. I went to a seminar on how to be a composer at the weekend, and the guy said `get a business card, learn to do computers, be punctual, buy drinks for performers, that'll get you a long way. And I was sitting at the back thinking, `well, these are all marginal sort of niceties, actually - to be a composer you've got to have something to say'."

By her own standards, the programme for her Irish tour is almost MOR - Bach's Anna Magdalena Notebook, Chopin mazurkas, some Bartok, Beethoven's Waldstein sonata, Gerald Barry's Triorchic Blues and a "tiny bit" of Thelonius Monk - but she talks about it with obvious excitement and enthusiasm. "I've worked so much with contemporary music that it gives you a totally different outlook - you tend to have a less reverential attitude to a piece like the Waldstein, for example.

It's quite a shocking piece of music, actually, and very radical in some ways, in this crazy motor rhythm is sets up. It's easy to lose sight of that fact if you just see it in the classical tradition, but if you remind yourself of the impact it must have had at the first performance, then you get a completely different view. "You think `my God, they must have thought Beethoven was a madman'. And that's the excitement I want to create rather than just `now let's all get down on our knees while I play this' . . . "