Midway through her annual Blueridge In­ternational Chamber Music Festival, singer and founding artistic director Dorothea Hayley is catching a few minutes of rest—a very few minutes of rest, as it turns out.

“I am sitting on the patio at my aunt’s beautiful house in North Vancouver,” she tells the Georgia Straight in a telephone interview. “And before I started talking to you, I was doing nothing for eight minutes!

“It was the first eight minutes for a really long time,” she adds.

Hayley’s lucky to get even this much downtime. Although her festival is still relatively small, it’s ambitious in both artistic scope and geographic range. Blueridge splits its focus between Kitsilano, where events take place in St. Mark’s Anglican Church, and North Van, where Mount Seymour United Church is hosting half of the festival’s eight concerts.

It’s too late to hear Blueridge’s tribute to the famously demanding German composer Helmut Lachenmann (it took place on the fest’s opening weekend on August 12 and 13), but concertgoers can still check out pianist Manuel Laufer’s interpretations of George Crumb’s Makrokosmos, Volumes I and II, as well as weekend performances of music by Maurice Ravel, Aaron Copland, Gabriel Fauré, and composer in residence Dorothy Chang.

With Nu:BC Collective flautist Paolo Bortolussi and Trio Accord cellist Rebecca Wenham among the performers, musical excellence is assured. It’s a little harder to explain, though, what criteria Hayley and co–artistic director Alejandro Ochoa use to program their event.

“I program very intuitively, which drives Alejandro crazy,” Hayley explains, adding that Ochoa is often “the voice of reason” in their partnership. “So I think we started this year with this poetic idea of ‘Seventh Heaven’, because it’s our seventh season. And then things kind of developed from there, to the point that there’s no discernible connection to that first impulse.”

She laughs, but agrees that there’s something decidedly celestial about Crumb’s two Makrokosmos cycles: each contains 12 short movements inspired by the signs of the zodiac. And the notion of the miniature carries over into the two concluding concerts, especially in Chang’s Bagatelles and Ravel’s equally jewel-like Chansons Madécasses, which she’ll sing.

“The element of exoticism is quite an undertone in the music,” she says of Ravel’s three Madagascar-inspired songs. “The first movement, I guess, is this very spare duet between the voice and the cello—it’s quite a repetitive, trancelike kind of thing. And then the second movement is very… What’s the word? Barbaric. But they’re so beautiful. And of course the combination of cello and flute is gorgeous.”

Small is beautiful, in other words, but that might not hold true for next year’s version of the Blueridge festival, which Hayley hints might involve some kind of staged or more theatrical presentation. “I don’t think I’m ready to talk about that yet,” she says with another laugh. “But I have some grand plans.”