Listening to Joanna MacGregor's extraordinary Play CD, which incorporates everything from John Dowland and Johann Sebastian Bach to John Cage and Talvin Singh, it struck me that the Scottish pianist must be one of the most formidably well-trained musicians I'd ever encountered.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

"The reason why I've ended up doing what I do is that I've escaped a lot of training, which is great," MacGregor reports, calling from her London home. "Even to the extent I didn't go to school at all until I was 11. I think it's a very useful thing, to escape that kind of institutionalization.

"You kind of pop out playing, sometimes," she adds. "And I think that technique is pretty easy to acquire. You don't really need to put yourself away for 25 years to get it."

Local listeners will have several opportunities to discover that firsthand, as MacGregor has been booked for four Festival Vancouver appearances: at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on Wednesday (August 3); at First Baptist Church next Friday and Saturday morning (August 5 and 6); and at Whistler's Maurice Young Millennium Place theatre next Saturday night (August 6). Unsurprisingly, each program offers something completely different.

At the Chan, MacGregor will be joining the CBC Radio Orchestra for the North American premiere of James MacMillan's Piano Concerto No. 2, a work she describes as "really dark, and very wild".

"Jimmy's music tends to be a criticism of Scotland," she explains. "He gets pretty angry about the Scottish character. And the thing that attracts me to this piece-and particularly the last movement, which is essentially based on Scottish reels but really, really gets out of control-is this very violent, slightly whirling thing that it does. He wrote that as a criticism of the Scots, and his other piano concerto, The Berserking, is a similar thing. It's about wild tribes that went out and got very drunk before they went into battle. Of course, being a MacGregor, I rather come down on the berserkers' side."

Berserk or not, the pianist also enjoys more nuanced forms of musical expression, and that aspect of her art will be on display at First Baptist Church. Her first appearance there, on Friday, will be a lecture-demonstration in which she'll talk about the state of contemporary British piano music, while Saturday's program swings from works by an assortment of U.K. modernists-including Thomas Adíƒ ¨s, Django Bates, and Howard Skempton-to tangos by Astor Piazzolla and early music by Dowland and William Byrd.

"What I've done is link up William Byrd with Tom Adíƒ ¨s," MacGregor comments. "I rather enjoy linking very old music with very new music, finding connections. And there's this fantastic William Byrd piece from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, which was written in something like 1550. It's a really sensational set of variations, and I'm linking it with a Tom Adíƒ ¨s piece that was written in the 1990s. Tom's piece somehow has echoes of the Byrd piece, which was completely accidental on his part. I'm doing the same thing with John Dowland and Django Bates. And the Howard Skempton pieces are just fantastic. He writes very profound pieces that last about 20 seconds. They're really, really great."

Range, it seems, is one of MacGregor's key concerns, and Saturday night's Whistler show is even more extraordinary in its breadth of focus. It's essentially two separate concerts: she'll open with a program of songs-by Mississippi bluesman Skip James, Canadian poet Leonard Cohen, and performance-art rocker Tom Waits, among others-and close, after an intermission, with Bach's Goldberg Variations in their entirety. This openness to every form of sonic art, she believes, is at the very heart of modern music-making.

"Even my heroes in the classical field, people like Edwin Fischer and Stanislav Richter, didn't really lead the kinds of lives people imagine concert pianists do, with this rather narrow repertoire and definition of themselves as players," says MacGregor, whose next project is a collaboration with Brazilian guitarist and composer Egberto Gismonti. "I mean, those people were composers and improvisers and they collaborated endlessly with other musicians. So the idea of just playing classical music and not doing anything else doesn't appeal to me-but also it doesn't quite work out like that, I'm glad to say."