Cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras Becomes a Larsen Artist

Queyras has joined the Denmark-based Larsen Strings as an endorsed artist

Larsen Strings has now welcomed the French cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras as an official Larsen Artist. Queyras uses Larsen Il Cannone strings on his 1696 Gioffredo Cappa cello — made available to him by the Mécénat Musical Société Générale.

He joins cellists including Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Julia Hagen, Pei Sian, Raphael Wallfisch, Tino Guo, Camille Thomas, and Nicolas Altstaedt on the Larsen Artist roster.

“The flexibility and warm power of the Larsen strings are the ideal tool to let the music blossom effortlessly​,” Queyras expressed. 

Alongside his role as a cello professor at the University of Music, Freiburg, Queyras is artistic director of the “Rencontres Musicales de Haute-Provence” festival in Forcalquier.

Additionally, Queyras performs in a trio with Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov, plus has been a long-time soloist of Ensemble Intercontemporain. In contemporary music, he has given world premieres of works by Ivan Fedele, Gilbert Amy, Bruno Mantovani, Michael Jarrell, Johannes-Maria Staud, Thomas Larcher, Tristan Murail, and more. 

As a soloist, he has appeared with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, London Symphony Orchestra, Gewandhausorchester and Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, working with conductors such as Iván Fischer, Philippe Herreweghe, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, François-Xavier Roth, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, and Sir Roger Norrington. 

His acclaimed discography includes cello concertos by Elgar, Schumann, Dvořák, Philippe Schoeller, and Gilbert Amy, as well as Schumann’s complete piano trios with Faust and Melnikov. In 2018, he released albums of works by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Antonio Vivaldi. 

This year, Queyras pledged to give all proceeds from his US concerts to Ukraine in support of President Zelensky and the latter’s United24 Foundation to support defense, humanitarian, and medical aid to Ukraine. 

More musicians who recently joined the Larsen Strings family of artists include Duek Woo Kim, Corina Belcea, Pei Sian, Seohyun Kim, Tamaki Kawakubo, Muriel Oberhofer, Yasutomo Ogitani, and Ju-Young Baek. The full list is available here.