Cellist
Jean-Guihen Queyras has an unusually broad repertory that stretches from the Baroque to the contemporary era, from concertos to chamber music to works for solo cello. A member for a time of the
Ensemble InterContemporain directed by avant-garde composer and conductor
Pierre Boulez,
Queyras has performed several major world premieres.
Queyras was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, on March 11, 1967. Part of his childhood was spent in Algeria, which was unusual since this period postdated Algeria's independence from France after a bloody independence war.
Queyras' family ultimately moved to France, where
Queyras took cello lessons. He studied at various institutions, including the Musikhochschule Freiburg in Germany and the Mannes College of Music in New York before coming under the influence of
Boulez and joining his famous contemporary music ensemble.
Queyras' recording career began in 1994, thanks to his presence in the
Boulez orbit, when he was heard on a Deutsche Grammophon recording featuring various
concertos by György Ligeti, conducted by
Boulez. His next recording came in 1998 on the Harmonia Mundi label; it featured the
Three Suites for Solo Violoncello of Benjamin Britten.
Queyras has often performed music for solo cello, including the unaccompanied cello suites of
J.S. Bach.
Queyras' discography is large and includes releases on the BIS and Erato labels as well as Harmonia Mundi (which is home to the majority). He has recorded mainstream works by
Brahms,
Elgar, and
Dvořák as well as contemporary and Baroque works.
Honored with the 2002 City of Toronto Glenn Gould International Protégé Prize in music,
Queyras began to land major concerto bookings with orchestras internationally. He is one of the few cellists to excel on both modern and period instruments, and he often performs and records with the historically oriented
Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. He may be best known for his advocacy of contemporary music, which has included world premieres of works by
Ivan Fedele,
Gilbert Amy (in Tokyo's Suntory Hall), and
Bruno Mantovani, among others. He has also championed the music of Anton Webern,
Luigi Dallapiccola, and
György Kurtág, as well as
Ligeti.
Queyras is an enthusiastic chamber music player whose collaborators include the Arcanto String Quartet, flutist
Emmanuel Pahud, and pianist
Alexander Melnikov.
In 2020,
Queyras and pianist
Alexandre Tharaud released Complices, a program of brief transcriptions conceptualized as short stories, and that year, he joined violinist
Isabelle Faust and pianist
Alexander Melnikov for a recording of Beethoven's complete sonatas for violin or cello and piano. He remained busy in the recording studio during the COVID-19 pandemic, appearing on recordings of
Beethoven's Triple Concerto, Op. 56, and a soloists' version of
Strauss' Don Quixote. In 2022, he and
Melnikov released an album of
cello sonatas by Chopin and Rachmaninov, and he was also heard on recordings of
Brahms' String Sextet and on the contemporary chamber recital Invisible Stream.
Queyras teaches at the Musikhochschule Freiburg and is an artistic director at the Rencontres Musicales de Haute Provence music festival. ~ James Manheim