Joanna MacGregor can still recall the many conversations she had with music company executives during the mid-1990s. The classically trained pianist once presented them with the idea of a double-disc set that has Johann Sebastian Bach's Art of Fugue sitting next to two numbers by Conlon Nancarrow, the renegade composer who wrote for the player piano, the early 20th-century invention that plays on perforated paper rolls.
Most of the number crunchers were not amused, the 48-year-old Briton says. 'They would say things to me like, 'Oh, I don't think you can do that because the record shops wouldn't know where to put that record'. And that really came home to me that that's the wrong way round.'
The recording - which followed MacGregor's concert of the same works in 1996 - did eventually see the light of day, but it illustrated vividly how the musician's unorthodox visions towards her art is constantly set on collision course with the classical establishment.
MacGregor's itinerary is proof of the eclecticism for which she's well known. In August, she performed alongside samplers (at the Punkt Festival in Norway); in November, she was in a concert dedicated to electronica (at Liverpool's Cornerstone Arts Festival, including a performance of Jonathan Harvey's Tombeau de Messiaen).
And in the past week she performed a mix of Satie, Schumann and Count Basie, a Gershwin concerto and preludes with the BBC Concert Orchestra in London, and an evening in Italy where Art of Fugue was followed by Moondog's Sidewalk Dances.
MacGregor will mine a different oeuvre when she appears this week at the Hong Kong Arts Festival, where she is scheduled to play Olivier Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur L'Enfant Jesus. The 135-minute, 20-movement work requires great stamina and delicacy to recreate the late French composer's mix of ethereal leitmotifs, near-mathematic symmetry, and the nuanced rhythms permeated with the colour of Indonesian gamelan and Indian raga.