From Hugh Tinney's point of view, the artistic directorship of the Music in Great Irish Houses festival was something that simply landed in his lap. "Out of the blue," he says, "early last September, I was rung up. I wasn't even aware there was a vacancy."

Nor were many others aware of the termination of the strange conflict of interest that had seen Judith Woodworth, the director of the National Concert Hall, working as artistic director of a festival that competed for the classical-music audience each June.

Tinney listened to the proposal, found he liked the idea and within a couple of days said yes. Now, less than nine months later, he's heading into the first festival that he has prepared and planned.

He is, he seems to suggest, the most unlikely of people to have ended up with his new responsibilities. If he'd seen the job advertised, he this effectively meant he knew very little about the festival's store of historic venues.

"I'd never been to Killruddery, for example, or Carton." His view of the festival was that it was "a celebrity kind of a series in the shape of a festival. There was generally an Irish involvement in one or two of the concerts. And it had a long history for a festival. I would have been aware of it in my student days, not because I went to it myself, but because my sisters helped out, on the doors, and things like that."

It doesn't seem to have taken him long to figure out what he wanted to do to reshape the event. "The one very clear, central thing that I did feel about it was to do with how I would approach it. I would approach it by making a theme. This year's theme is global to the whole festival. That isn't necessarily what I was planning initially. I was thinking more that three or four concerts might have some unifying connection; the rest might be contrasting."

But then he came up with the French theme. The more he thought about it, "apart from the flexibility of repertoire, and periods and groupings that it would allow, and the fact that, to my knowledge, a French-themed festival of that nature hadn't been done in Dublin recently," the more suitable it seemed for a festival making a comeback after a lost year.

As Tinney talks about it, there is no mystery about what he has done. He didn't make the first phone call to an agent or artist until November, yet he has been able to get virtually all his first-choice performers. He seems almost anxious to profess his ignorance of repertoire when he strays out of the reach of the sort of music he performs. So he's not shy of taking advice from the likes of the Hilliard Ensemble, who'll be performing music from Dufay to the present at Killruddery, in Co Wicklow, on Monday June 11th.

The Tinney approach is going to be flexible rather than of the control-freak kind. And most of the questions about future years - in respect of programming, venues, the wisdom of undertaking a thematic thread with venues spread around the Republic, the alternative strategy of restricting events to venues close to the capital - draw gentle blanks. He's too busy thinking about this year's problems to have many firm ideas about the future.

There's just one new venue in this year's line-up, the Chapel Royal in Dublin Castle (he's playing there himself, with the Daedalus Wind Quintet on Thursday June 14th). And if you look at the programme and wonder why the French theme by and large ignores the output of the past half-century, it's simply because Tinney wasn't thinking about his theme in that way. But he has never been a man to be daunted by a challenge.

So don't be surprised if serious new music or, indeed, new commissions turn out to be a feature of some future festival.

Other performers at this year's Music in Great Irish Houses festival, which runs from Friday June 8th to Sunday June 17th, include pianists Pascal RogΘ and Gordon Fergus-Thompson, soprano Sarah Walker, violinist Augustin Dumay, harpsichordist Christophe Rousset, the Nash Ensemble and Duo Medici. Details from 01-2781528