Joanna MacGregor
Joanna MacGregor performs Schubert, Desyatnikov and Brahms Piano Sonata No.3 in an evening recital at Oxford Playhouse
Franz Schubert 12 Ländler, D790 Leonid Desyatnikov Eight Songs of Bukovina Joanna MacGregor For Nina Simone: Blackbird Little Girl Blue Good Bait
Interval
Johannes Brahms Piano Sonata no.3 in F minor, op.5
An innovative force in the music world, Joanna MacGregor has played the great halls and premiered many landmark compositions. She is an inspirational Head of Piano at the Royal Academy of Music, a regular broadcaster, a sought-after curator of music festivals, and the Music Director and Principal Conductor of Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra.
The first half of the programme is rustic, jazzy, bluesy - Schubert’s charming Austrian country dances, Leonid Desyatnikov’s 20th century re-working of folk melodies from western Ukraine, and Joanna’s own tributes to Nina Simone.
Brahms 3rd Piano Sonata fills the second half. Brahms wrote this sonata as he turned 20. It is an enormous piece, and with so many ideas that it takes five movements to follow all of them through. Brahms never wrote another piano sonata - he had said everything that he might ever want to say about piano sonatas in this magnificent example.