INNOVATIVE pianist, conductor, composer, festival curator and academic Joanna MacGregor OBE presents a musical sketch of her life at the National Centre for Early Music in York tomorrow night.

Her 7.30pm programme will take the Head of Piano at the Royal Academy of Music “from the Bach preludes and gospel songs I played as a child, through to my first jazz love, Thelonious Monk, and my first ‘difficult’ composer, Charles Ives; from my travels across the Deep South of the United States, and my first journeys in Latin America.”

This programme has been selected not so much to mark a particular landmark in 55-year-old Joanna’s life or career but because “it’s an interesting thing to do”. “Bach has been a huge part of my life, and it’s nice to combine his two pieces with two Shostakovich works,” she says.

“I’ve always been a huge fan of Charles Ives; I’ve played the Piazzolla Tangos in an arrangement with five musicians very fruitfully, playing them with the original members of the Piazzolla Quintet in Argentina, and I feel I can make something epic by playing them on my own.”

What has Joanna concluded from putting together this musical sketch of her life? “I don’t draw any conclusions at all, but it’s interesting how the programme goes round in a circle from Bach to Piazzolla, who put a lot of Bach influences into his music. In a way, it’s fascinating in the travelling you do that you constantly go back to earlier material and so you constantly find that composers are referencing each other, which is marvellous to juxtapose, and my journey in this concert is a way to reinforce that.”

Tomorrow will evoke memories of Joanna’s most recent visit to York. “Rather than a concert, I came to the wedding of one of my students,” she says. Did she play that day? “Yes, a piece of Bach.”

Just as she will tomorrow.

• Joanna MacGregor, National Centre for Early Music, York, tomorrow, 7.30pm. Box office: 01904 658338 or ncem.co.uk