John Cage Musicircus, Bath Festival, review UNDER pianist Joanna MacGregor's directorship, the Bath Festival has become a joyously inclusive thing, mingling folk, jazz, world and classical music. It's a happy coincidence that MacGregor's last year as director coincides with the centenary of that most all-embracing and inclusive of composers, John Cage. Last Friday his late multimedia extravaganza Musicircus formed the centrepiece of a riot of free music events taking place all over the city. Like all Cage's apparently anarchic events, this one requires meticulous preparation. Musicircus prescribes a method for translating a book into "a performance without actors." The text is chopped up, rearranged, and recited, and mingled with appropriate sound recordings and music relevant in theme but placed by chance. Whether anything of the book survives this drastic dismemberment depends on how sensitively and seriously it's done. In this case, it was quite a lot. The chosen book was Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, which follows a group of circus entertainers in their journey from London to Siberia. The narrative vanished, as one would expect, but scattered phrases in the recitation - done with the requisite seriousness by Oogoo Maia - conveyed an atmosphere of extravagant magic. The sounds, fed through four loudspeakers, summoned up fleeting images - a cock crowing, the sound of steam trains. laughing children. At one point a tiger's roar neatly coincided with the reciter's mention of a tiger, and this sudden appearance of sense amid the nonsense was so startling, we all laughed out loud. Dotted round the aisles and galleries were flautists and clarinettists and trumpeters of Bath Spa University and COMA (Contemporary Music for Amateurs). They dropped little scraps of Sousa marches and circus tunes and music-hall songs into the mix. Sometimes the flow of events thinned to the reciter's voice, or a single perky piccolo; at other times, we were immersed in gentle, burbling anarchy. Above everything, the face of Cage, filmed in the act of witnessing something (perhaps this very piece?) smiled in quizzical amusement. After the piece was over Joanna MacGregor came on stage, and played some of Cage's lovely Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano. These turn the piano into a magic orchestra of gongs and bells. Often these pieces are rendered with aloof objectivity, but MacGregor played them with tender, flexible grace. Cage's image, still on the screen above, appeared to smile at just the right moments. But of course that was pure chance.