Jean-Guihen Queyras, who has recorded Bach's Cello Suites twice, played all six in a single sitting at Wigmore Hall on Saturday 12 September 2026.
Jean-Guihen Queyras, who has recorded Bach’s Cello Suites twice, played all six in a single sitting at Wigmore Hall in Marylebone on Saturday 12 September 2026. It was the hall’s second recital that day.
Queyras was born in Montreal in 1967 and moved to Algeria at five and to France at eight. He made his name as a soloist with Ensemble intercontemporain, at the centre of contemporary music.
His recordings include Haydn and Vivaldi concertos with the Freiburger Barockorchester and Beethoven’s complete cello and piano works with Alexander Melnikov. He won the Glenn Gould Protégé Prize in 2002 and has taught at Freiburg since 2011.
The Bach suites are the through-line of his career, and his two recordings of them sit decades apart. Written for an instrument that has to imply the harmony it cannot sound, they are the centre of the cello’s solo repertoire.
Víkingur Ólafsson had played the lunchtime recital hours earlier, in the opening week of the Wigmore season. Queyras gave the whole cycle in order, with four suites before the interval. He added Kurtág’s Árnyak after the sixth.