Given François-Frédéric Guy’s exceptional ability to create orchestral sonorities on the piano – and his listing of Wagner, Bruckner and Richard Strauss among his favourite composers – it is perhaps surprising to learn that he heard only piano music in his earliest years. Both his parents were pianists, neither professionally, though he believes his father could have had a musical career if given the right support.

“At the very beginning, the only live music I heard was my parents playing,” says Guy. “Later they did their best to take me to concerts.” The small village on the border of Normandy where Guy was born in 1969 (near to Monet’s famous garden and studio at Giverny) did not boast a piano teacher; from the age of seven Guy was driven once a week to take piano lessons in Evreux. “Evreux had a musical life – not the best you can find, but we had some famous artists appearing. Fischer-Dieskau came, for example, performing Das Lied von der Erde.

“There’s a famous cathedral in Evreux – famous because all of the town was destroyed during the Second World War, except the cathedral. I saw Olivier Messiaen there. He came with Yvonne Loriod and she performed all 20 Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus. I have his autograph from that occasion. So the area was not empty of music.

“My parents also took me into Paris when I was a little older, 11 or 12. In the early Eighties I went regularly to Orchestre de Paris concerts. We saw Ashkenazy, Barenboim, Pollini... My father naturally gravitated towards piano recitals or piano concertos. The recordings we had were very much biased in that direction. That was not a problem – except when I arrived at the Paris Conservatoire I knew very little outside the piano repertoire. I had to do my own private studying.”