You don't have to spend long in the company of Jean-Guihen Queyras to imagine him as having once been an irrepressibly hyperactive child. I met him at his home, a semi-rural retreat within comfortable commuting distance of Paris, and shortly to be abandoned in a move to Freiburg in Germany. Our time together is punctuated by calls and messages about property transactions, the minutiae of packing for removal, and contacts over recording projects.
Apparently unflappable, unfailingly charming, and intelligently responsive to questions from whatever direction, he seems like ideal raw material for a panel on a chat show.
It was that unflappability which helped establish the relationship with Kilkenny in the first place. He was invited to give a concert in the city in March 1999. At the eleventh hour, on the actual morning of the concert, his pianist, Alexandre Tharaud, was taken ill. But Queyras travelled on his own, and, with that professional savoir-faire that always makes a good impression, played a completely different programme of works for unaccompanied cello.
One of the upshots was an invitation to perform at last year's Kilkenny Arts Festival, two programmes, one with pianist, one without. "Apparently," he says with a smile, "they liked it. Then, later, they called me and said, 'Jean-Guihen, would you like to put a series together?'" He was delighted, "because chamber music is, for me, the ultimate way to make music. All my life, it's been the favourite part of my activities, playing with friends, putting programmes together." At the age of 16, in partnership with his older brother, a violinist, he started his own festival in the south of France, Rencontre Musicale de Haute-Provence, which began with the brothers giving concerts, as he puts it, "just for the people who live there, for the gas man, for the peasants".
One of the joys of the Kilkenny request was that it came without any guidelines. "It was really, 'Who do you want to play with, and what do you want to play?'" No theme was specified. The choice was completely free. "They were so trusting. It was wonderful." And with the freedom came a sense of deep responsibility, because he liked the people he'd met in Kilkenny, loved the place, he's really enthusiastic about the Parade Tower of Kilkenny Castle as a performing space and wanted to create a blend of music and musicians that would offer something special. "As the ideas came to me, I always submitted them, but there was never any disagreement, never any censorship. I think it's very courageous of them to trust someone in this way."
So, what did guide his choices? First of all, he chose the works that would stand at the core of each of the programmes. The first he mentions is Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, a piece written in Stalag VIIIa, a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1941, and premiΦred there by an ensemble of POWs, including the composer at the piano, before an audience of 5,000 fellow captives. To this he added the Schubert String Quintet, the Dvorak Piano Quartet, a work which, he feels, deserves a far higher profile than it has yet achieved. "I thought, of course, I should bring some French music, not because I have to, but because I like it." Which brought in FaurΘ's G minor Piano Quartet.
With the main pillars in place, he then set about the task of building well-balanced programmes around them. He sounds a word of caution about musical choices which look well on paper. His interest is totally focused on "what is going to work really well in the evening, when the listener is there".
He acknowledges the value of "themes and threads" but seems to feel it's an approach that's now overworked, however great its potential, or however interesting its results when successfully applied. So, when thinking of the Dvorak Piano Quartet, he decided to precede it with the early solo viola sonata by the avant-garde German composer Bernd-Alois Zimmermann.
"It will be a great contrast. And before that, some Beethoven to open with, the Clarinet Trio, because it's young Beethoven, very lively.
"Even in the all-French programme of Poulenc and FaurΘ, I thought, 'OK. French programme. But the FaurΘ is the late FaurΘ, with these lines where you never know whether it will end or not, which sort of lose themselves, wandering a little bit. And then the Poulenc, the Violin Sonata, which is quite abrupt, very theatrical. They're quite close in time, three or four decades, and yet so different. What I've tried to avoid is putting together two or three pieces which have the same kind of tension, or the same kind of emotional expression. On the contrary, the main thing I'm looking for is contrasts."
And the choice of musicians? What interested him here was the freedom to choose "musicians from different horizons, musicians you met in different places, between whom you try find an alchemy." He explains each of the individual choices. "Christine Busch is a violinist I've known a very long time, since my studies in Freiburg. We did chamber music together, playing in a string quartet."
String quartets, he says, were "my religion," and though he has no desire to play in a regular professional quartet, he still dreams up projects that will enable him to combine his private passion with his professional career.
Busch, he describes as "very unusual and very apart, in a way," because of the way she straddles the baroque world (including leading orchestras under Harnoncourt) and the world of conventional instruments. She'll be directing Kilkenny Arts Festival's opening concert by Camerata Bern.
"She has great leadership," he says. "She is someone who always has a very strong feeling about the music, and is extremely dynamic as a player. Most of her career, maybe 70 per cent, is on period instruments. I heard some Vivaldi from her this summer, which was really like something from another planet. And I'm quite thrilled to do this Dvorak with her. Since she's mostly from the baroque and old instrument point of view, she won't come to Dvorak with a fat sound, but in a very cutting way. She's quite edgy, in a good sense.
"Priya Mitchell, a latecomer in the programmes, is a wonderful violinist, who runs the Oxford Chamber Music Festival. We've known each other for seven years, through Christine. It's really great, because, although Priya and Christine are totally different players, they get along really very well, musically and personally. Priya has an incredible, physical relationship with her instrument. She's like a cat, going to the string, with an incredible sense of sound, and a very intuitive type of playing, although she's also a very intelligent player.
"If I had only heard them separately and they didn't know each other, maybe I wouldn't have thought about putting them together. But they do fit very well together.
"The violist, Anna Lewis, I'm very much looking forward to. I've never played with her, and I've never heard her, either, to be quite sincere. But I completely trust the people who recommended her. I've heard about her for years."
He names viola ace, Tabea Zimmermann, as someone who gave Lewis an unqualified recommendation. "Everyone describes her as extremely temperamental, energetic, an Argerich type of presence. With this team of ladies, we'll have quite powerful music-making."
ALEXANDRE Tharaud, the pianist, is a regular partner, "a wonderful musician, an incredible colourist, with a touch that's quite unique. That's why he's very, very special for French music. Although he's actually never played the Messiaen before, he has the right touch to look for the colours there."
Queyras describes him as "very easy to work with. Some people are easy to work with, too easy, and you don't get any response at all. That's not the case with him . He's there. He's always happy to play. He's always with what you say. But at the same time you get a very personal and very clear musical response.
"Ronald van Spaendonck is a wonderful clarinet player. He's got a marvellous sound. He just played the Messiaen in London, at the Wigmore Hall, and apparently the clarinet solo in the middle was a sensation. And he's so much fun. Like most Belgian people, he's got a great sense of humour. He laughs so much in rehearsals, which is also important.
"And then, Gesine, my wife, I mention her last, because she's playing only in the Schubert. She is like Christine, only more so, playing about 80 per cent of her concerts on the baroque scene. She's played continuo and solo cello for Christophe Rousset, she's playing regularly with Herreweghe, and she will also be playing in the baroque programmes they have in Kilkenny."
For anyone who knows Queyras's background - a decade playing in Pierre Boulez's Ensemble InterContemporain - the absence of new music may seem surprising. The Zimmermann sonata is not far short of half a century old, and the Poulenc Clarinet Sonata is actually the most recent work in Queyras's Kilkenny selections.
He seems surprised and a little nonplussed when I point this out. He hadn't noticed, and though he often makes a point of including recent pieces in his own recital programmes, he hadn't given the matter any attention on this occasion. "I feel so free about that subject, about my identity, about my image, about 'Do I have to do new music or not?' " Fifteen or 20 years ago, he thinks, it was still a problem that musicians faced, being branded as specialists in a particular area. "It's a good thing," he says, "that my generation doesn't have to worry about specialisation."
The completely un-specialised programmes devised by Jean-Guihen Queyras run at Kilkenny Arts Festival from Tuesday, August 14th, to Sunday 19th. Full details from the festival office on 056-521745
