School’s out, and the picturesque villages of East Neuk in Fife are filling up with
holidaymakers and second-homers hoping for a return of the heatwave. This weekend they
were full of music lovers, too, for the return of the East Neuk Festival, an annual gathering
of top-class musicians across the Fife coast. The little church of Kilrenny hosted two of this
year’s opening concerts, and the solo recital from the star cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras set
the bar so high that every other concert this weekend struggled to match it. Queyras is one
of the great cellists of Europe, a musician who could pack out halls in Hamburg or Prague,
and seeing him performing alone in Kilrenny felt as implausible as it did magical. He had
chosen a daringly varied programme, but lavished equal care on everything he touched,
ranging from the delicate baroquerie of Marais to the uncompromising modernism of
Kurtág. The dark, sometimes desperate quality that he brought to Bach’s Cello Suite No 5 in
C minor plumbed deep expressive reserves, and he eased us into the opening of Ahmet
Saygun’s Partita for cello solo with a two-tone drone that felt like submitting to hypnosis.
He’s as extraordinary to watch as to hear, seeming to lose himself completely in his
instrument as though his cello is an extension of himself, every sinew strained in intense
concentration as gorgeous clusters of notes poured from his bow in a manner that ought to
be impossible from just one instrument. The oaky tone of Queyras’s cello seemed to catch
beautifully the resonance of the church’s wooden interior and make the building sing along.
