Luckily, he lives on the ground floor. Plus, he is one of the most pleasant artists I've ever interviewed. We sit in his back garden in Sint-Gillis, in the sun.
His family was musical. His father taught music and conducted a choir, and his brother is Bart Defoort, a saxophonist and composer. But his own first steps were largely untrained. "I just played stuff," he says. "Rock bands, composed a youth mass that owed a bit to the Beatles."
He attended the Antwerp Conservatory, but finds it a wonder he graduated at all. "I just went to the classes I liked," he laughs. Defoort clearly loves music, lives for it perhaps. I suspect he would have agreed with Alban Berg's famous statement to Gershwin, who was nervous about playing something too "show-tuney" for the master. "Mr Gershwin, music is music."
"Music is all one language," Defoort confirms, stirring his green tea. "I was afraid when I was younger that I'd just end up becoming a sort of Flemish Gershwin. Now I think it would be great!" He doesn't have much time for the division between high and low music: jazz, pop, folk and classical are all influences and all joys. "You can hear the jazz in Sleeping Beauties if you listen," he says.
The music for Sleeping Beauties might be considered severe to many ears, but it has a strong melodic line and recognisable themes. It is a good introduction to contemporary opera - a nice length, visually arresting, magnificent voices and music that ranges from hopping discordance to baroque exuberance.
Anyone who saw Defoort's last opera, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, will want to see this one, which is the fruit of another intense collaboration between Defoort as composer and Guy Cassiers from Antwerp's Toneelhuis as director. Based on the book by Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata, Sleeping Beauties concerns an old man who visits a brothel in which customers are only allowed to lie next to the drugged and sleeping virgins.
This is opera as multidisciplinary theatre - dance, music, acrobatics and video. The intense inner life of the anti-hero Eguchi is conveyed through the music and text but also through the abstract architecture of the scenography, where reality (the tatami-covered floor of the brothel) and fantasy (the sleeping girl floating over the stage) convey state of mind as much as action.
In opera, there is usually a libretto, which the composer writes music to and which the director brings to life on stage. But Sleeping Beauties was from the start a hand-in-hand collaboration. "Guy has such amazing energy!" explains Defoort. "And after The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, we know how to work together. But it was a very difficult project." Defoort himself insisted on something "with bigger themes, poetic, more abstract."
Cassiers, he says, "would suggest things musically, and I'd tell him what I felt about certain visual ideas, and he'd turn it into reality. We are both prepared to be very naïve about the other person's skill set."
Their working processes are however very different. "Guy overloads at the start and then takes things out," says Defoort, "whereas I start from a white page and write down everything line-by-line out of my head. And then its finished. Someone asked me when I first heard Sleeping Beauties played by an orchestra what changes I wanted to make, and I said ‘none'. I had already heard it."
The new opera, which premiered in Brussels' De Munt this month and now goes on to Antwerp and Ghent, may end up being an international hit. It has the glossy feel to it that definitely lifts it out of the provincial and into the global. The powerhouse behind the production is LOD, a music theatre production team based in Ghent, where Defoort is a resident conductor.
As nervously noted earlier, Defoort is a jazz musician, and his fingers are constantly itching to get back to his group, Dreamtime. His jazz is fluid and accessible: I recently received a marvellous introduction to it at Bozar, where Defoort and other musicians provided live accompaniment to the silent Belgian film l'Hirondelle et la Mésange. He has plans to play more, and he has several collaborations in the pipeline.
And another opera? "Three years," he states. "Right now, if I have any time at all, I want to spend it with my music and with my kids."
I'm not sure if I can define Defoort as a Flemish composer. Of course he's Flemish through and through - born in Bruges, educated in Antwerp. But "I'm Belgian," he says, "with strong Flemish roots. The Belgian character is both cosmopolitan and provincial; I like that. I'd never want to be called a BV (Bekende Vlamingen, or Famous Fleming). "But," he laughs out lout, "I wouldn't mind being a BB - Bekende Brusseleer!"
Defoort notes that "the real tragedy is the same here as all over. It's all about crowds, fame and celebrity." It's true that, apart from notable successes like Hooverphonic, the Flemish music scene has not burst into worldwide attention like its dance and visual art. "The music scene is less unified here, and, as a result, no-one takes us seriously."
I ask him where he feels most comfortable in Belgium, and he hesitates before saying "Brussels, of course, and then - well there's the country roads of Bruges, out towards Diksmuide, the flatness, the sky. And then the Hautes Fagnes. Yes, these are my favourite places."
On reflection, these places share something very Belgian: their quiet beauty, the understated but powerful landscapes of north and south. He smiles again, and I think that's rather what he is like himself - authentic, un-showy, anchored.
House of the Sleeping Beauties
3-5 June, deSingel, Antwerp
20 June, Vlaamse Opera, Ghent
Flanders Today is a 
-8°C / -2°C
