Joanna MacGregor at the Town Hall Concert Chamber

By WILLIAM DART

Drawing a full house - along with a clutch of standing ovations and illiterate "Bravos" - Joanna MacGregor's recital might have seemed one of the successes of the season.

The charismatic British pianist had come with the sort of programme that dreams are made of.

But, alas, dreams have a nasty habit of not coming true.

The mood of the evening was casual chic, but this was no excuse for such shabby touches in the presentation as taped-together scores being floated to the floor after use.

And twittering chatter from a recording technician at the back of the Circle proved frustrating to more than one punter, $55 poorer for the ticket.

Beethoven's C minor Variations were a confident opener.

At the time, I was a little ruffled by the odd wilful reading, but ... worse was to come.

Three jazz offerings by Django Bates were predictable crowd-pleasers and his two originals were certainly more fetching than a transcription of It's Only a Paper Moon, which seemed hellbent on cramming an encyclopedia of jazz stylings into a few minutes, complete with nudging quotes from Debussy's Clair de Lune.

Bartok's Sonata was knife-edge stuff, although an instrument with a stronger treble would have helped those octaves ring out.

But let's not carp - this was exciting, vibrant stuff and, after all, had not MacGregor alerted us to the fact that Bartok had been inspired by vital and virile folk music?

After interval, Bach's Goldberg Variations were a shocker.

The theme was ornamented to within a demi-semiquaver of its life and decidedly soft-centred. Contrapuntal variations were often hammered out (the Fughetta was particularly brutal) and the virtuoso two-keyboard variations were a battlefield of smudged notes - all this in a work that was written to soothe an insomniac patron!

There were nice touches. Variation 13 came across rather effectively as an ancestor of a Chopin Nocturne and, unlike some, I was quite taken when the final theme emerged from the lingering harmonies of the previous variation.

There were two encores. A Satie Gnossienne was refreshingly simple and unaffected, a virtuoso arrangement of Piazzolla's Libertango just the opposite.