Pianist glad she wasn't "trained too much"

A refreshing article on pianist MacGregor. If only more pianists (musicians) were this open to new ideas and music.

"I didn't have that thing about, 'Oh, you're talented. That means you must practice four hours a day,"' she said from her home in Brighton, Eng-

land. "I just grew up and I played. I played for my friends, and I mucked around, basically."

And, as far as she is concerned, "mucking around" was the ideal approach.

"One of my great fortunes was not being trained too much," she said.

Such thinking is sacrilege in many classical circles. But MacGregor, 44, is not your ordinary classical pianist. In fact, she is not even completely comfortable with the label "classical pianist."

One critic has described her as "exhilaratingly, recklessly democratic" in her musical tastes,

because the London-born pianist has no qualms about mixing musical genres in unconventional and sometimes unlikely ways."

Get the low down right