Cello cognoscenti, for you we have news both good and bad. First the downside: Jean-Guihen Queyras’s performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s six immortal suites for cello, at the intimate Orpheum Annex, is sold-out. This should surprise no one, for Queyras is among his generation’s most thoughtful musicians, and the Cello Suites are, of course, among the most sublime compositions ever written for his instrument.

They’re also pieces that Queyras knows especially well. Having performed them almost since infancy, the cellist recently went even deeper into their architecture by commissioning six contemporary composers to write musical commentaries on the suites, as part of his Six Suites, Six Echoes project.

“It was one tool to give me freedom—freedom from the thousands of other interpretations that I have in my ear,” Queyras explains in a transatlantic telephone call from Leipzig, Germany, where he is performing Ludwig van Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with pianist Martin Helmchen and violinist Isabelle Faust.

“The idea was to give this experience also to the listener, and I think it worked nicely,” he adds. “If you sit down and it’s one Bach piece and another Bach piece and another Bach piece, people can be worried that they are too predictable, in terms of the construction. To give them, before each piece, a totally different sound universe, I think it opens the mind.”

One small piece of good news, or perhaps fantasy, is that Queyras is not performing the commissioned pieces during his Vancouver visit, which allows for the possibility that he might return to perform the full, two-day program at some point in the future. More concrete cheer comes from knowing that local listeners will have a second chance to hear the cellist during this weekend’s Vancouver Recital Society–produced Winterlude mini-festival: he’ll join pianist Alexander Melnikov at the Vancouver Playhouse, following Melnikov’s own solo matinee there.

“Sasha, what I love about him is that he’s such an unusual musician,” Queyras says of his long-time friend and musical partner. “Even when you’ve played with him for 15 years, you don’t know what he’s going to do next time that you play a piece that you have played 20 times together. He’s so unexpected all the time, in a good way. I mean, he is really improvising very much all the time. There is this quality in his playing: a great clarity, combined with invention in the moment. He pushes probably much further than me—and that’s both inspiring and challenging, I feel.”

On the program—next to works by Robert Schumann, Beethoven, and Anton Webern—is one curious choice: Frédéric Chopin’s Cello Sonata. “We both like this piece but not many other people do, for different reasons,” Queyras says, laughing. “Cellists usually don’t like it because the pianist is playing many more notes. The piano is quite dominant in a way it’s difficult to defend as a cellist.”

Perversely, that seems to be part of the work’s appeal—along with its odd profusion of subthemes and diversions. “The form can be a bit puzzling,” Queyras explains, “so we are going to try to show why we like this piece very much. It’s not like any other cello-and-piano sonata, basically.”

Expect inspired musicianship—and more than a few surprises.

The Vancouver Recital Society’s Winterlude festival takes place at the Orpheum Annex on Saturday (January 21) and the Vancouver Playhouse on Sunday (January 22).