Arthur Rubinstein had a compact reply for people who asked how to become great pianists. "Try to be born again with talent," he said. "You must have talent, then all you have to do is improve on it." Talent alone, of course, is not enough. Opportunity plays a great part, too. And one of the best opportunities for the reborn talent would be to surface within a musical family, preferably with parents who know when to be encouraging and when not to push.

The Swedish cellist Torleif Thedeen was born into one of those families where music making was a fact of life. His father was a professional violinist, and, as the youngest of four brothers, he could hear playing, practising and recordings at all hours of the day.

It wasn't until he was eight that he came to take up an instrument, and he had to bypass the violin in favour of the cello, because the local community music school didn't have a violin teacher at the time. "They chose for me to play the cello," he says, adding with a persuasive resonance of satisfaction: "It was a good choice."

Music became more serious around the age of 13, when Ola Karlsson, now principal cellist of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, became his teacher. Karlsson was only 10 years older than his pupil, and the rapport seems to have been immediate and deep. "He came to my home," says Thedeen, "and I had three- or four-hour lessons with him. He was practising with me. So I learned how to practise, and of course it was a lesson also, but at that age it's very important to get the flow."

It has often been said that you can't really teach a person how to play an instrument, but you can teach them how to practise it. And Thedeen is clearly grateful for the painstaking introduction to how to work at the cello, something that helped him on a path of extremely rapid development.

He gave up regular school at the age of 15, having completed the legal requirement of nine years, and concentrated on music. He spent four years in full-time study at his local community music school, housed in the beautifully restored Edsberg Castle outside Stockholm. After a year in London with William Pleeth and six months at the University of Southern California, he was on his own.

Winning three significant competitions in 1985 - the Hammer-Rostropovich prize in Los Angeles, the Pablo Casals competition in Budapest and the European Broadcasting Union's International Tribune for young interpreters in Bratislava - helped to ensure there was no shortage of work. And he hasn't really looked back since.

Translating the achievements of a talented, competition-winning student into the reality of a successful career is not plain sailing. Few music colleges properly train their students in career management and the decisions and crises it involves.

Thedeen admits his studies left him no better prepared than anyone else. His advantage, he says, was his background: a happy childhood, stable family, lots of friends and warm encouragement. But dealing with people, he suggests, was in his genes, too, and in his upbringing.

"I also learned how to deal with people and, socially, how to read people. My parents were very interested in how people behave. That's maybe the best school regarding managing a career - or having a good marriage and having a good life in general," he laughs.

"That really helped me a lot, and also in the business of trying to have good relations with colleagues, with agents. Either you have this method of having a career, or you have this method," he says, making a gesture of tension and struggle.

When he was young he was anxious to grab at every opportunity. Now he's more relaxed, focusing on his playing and remaining true to himself. The biggest challenge is having to be away from his family. "That hurts me if it's too long a period of time."

Thedeen is part of a wave of successful musicians to have emerged from the Nordic countries in recent decades. He doesn't have a ready explanation for the phenomenon, and suggests it may be a snowball effect that started with the profile achieved by singers from Scandinavia and Finland.

"Talents you find worldwide," he says. "Maybe it's just that you have to get the talents into the snowball." Then follows another strand of thinking. "There are different schools of music making: Russian, German, French. Maybe it's got a little bit old-fashioned. In Scandinavia we're a little bit different. We're smorgasbord. We pick a little of this and a little of that, and we go out and see what happens. That kind of freedom has helped also."

In Sweden, of course, there have been the community music schools, funded by local authorities. "We used to have a really good system, where everyone who wanted got the opportunity to try an instrument and to find out whether they liked it or had a talent. At the moment they are cutting back on everything, which is very bad. I think that has been important. People didn't have to go to private teachers. For almost no money, young people could learn to play an instrument."

The scheme was introduced in the 1940s but, with public funding under pressure, music schools have proved vulnerable to cutbacks. Some communities have managed to retain the open access, but in others the steepness of the fees now charged has created social divisions.

ONE of the most important influences of Thedeen's student years was a colleague, the Norwegian cellist Truls Mork. "We were very close, always comparing and competing. That was very important. Sometimes we practised in the same room. People thought we were crazy." It's quite an image, two of the world's leading cellists as students, playing the Dvorak or Schumann concertos, or maybe even a Bach cello suite, in unison.

In London, he was able to go to concerts as never before. "That was very important, to hear so many good concerts - and also bad concerts. A famous name doesn't necessarily give a fantastic concert. That was an important eye-opener, ear-opener."

The London concert that made the biggest impression was the Amadeus Quartet playing Schubert's Death And The Maiden. Words fail him as he tries to outline what went on, especially in the playing of the leader, Norbert Brainin. Interestingly, when I ask about the single musical experience he treasures most, either as performer or listener, he singles out a performance from his few years as an orchestral musician in Stockholm: being in the cello section of the Stockholm Philharmonic, playing Mahler's Ninth Symphony. It's a memory that's linked not to the conductor or the performance but to being within the world of the music, listening to it take shape as he was contributing to it.

The orchestral years, he feels, mark him off from many soloists, who understand neither the internal dynamics of orchestras nor what he characterises as the range of acoustic phenomena that operate within orchestral music making. It's clear his time in the orchestra was as much one of learning by listening as of performing.

On the cusp of 40, he teaches - at Edsberg Castle, where else? - and the bulk of his performing is devoted to concertos. His main ambition, he says, is simply to develop his playing. leads him into deeper territory, however. "It's a life-long process to learn to play without controlling," he says. "You have to control, of course, but the aim is not having to control the control, but to let it control itself. The only way is to practise and, mentally, not be too anxious about the wrong things."

What he's clearly after is that sense of accommodating the unforeseen, and possibly unforeseeable, that is found in so much great music making, and that makes it possible to listen to great performers again and again, even on disc, with renewed pleasure. At the ESB Vogler Spring Festival this weekend, he'll be putting himself to the test in Kodaly's Solo Cello Sonata (Sunday, 2 p.m.), Schumann's Adagio and Allegro (Monday, noon) and Prokofiev's late Cello Sonata (Monday, 4 p.m.).

The ESB Vogler Spring Festival runs at St Columba's Church, Drumcliffe, Co Sligo, from tomorrow until Monday. Information and booking on 079-64202.