Meet Daniel Pioro, the violinist making classical music cool – and who loves playing scales

“Classical musicians are cover artists,” says Daniel Pioro with a cheeky shrug. “We play Other People’s Music and we shouldn’t be ashamed of that.” 

What the violinist – praised as one of the most “radical”, “bracing” and “intriguing” of his generation – does feel some of his colleagues should be ashamed of is “playing this very old music the way they’ve heard it a hundred times before”. He thinks performers who do that turn into musical versions “of those street artists you see in Paris, drawing replicas of the Mona Lisa on the pavements in chalk. It’s boring. It doesn’t interest me.”

Pioro’s solution is to approach all old music “as though it were written today, for me. I have decided to pretend that some of it is even written by me.” 

Thrilled by working with contemporary composers Jonny Greenwood and Cassandra Miller he’s found that engaging with the human behind the score has helped him “remove that sense of awe without losing any of the magic”. So when he steps onto the stage at the Aldeburgh Music Festival next month to play the Brahms Violin Sonatas (one of seven featured performances), he tells me he’ll be “taking a step out into the dark.”

Although Pioro lives in Edinburgh with his wife and their one-year-old son, I’ve come to meet him at the London flat. Apart from a small cluster of primary coloured toddler toys and books, the concrete walled room is muted, modern and minimalist. Pioro pours two tumblers of water and sets them on a stone table before grinning. Although he’s superficially polite – no swearing at all – there’s a glittering mischief to him. A glint in his eye, a playful, pecking precision in his quiet speech and the odd, dismissive flutter from his fingers. His Polish surname means “feather”, although it can also be translated as “quill” or “pen”. What about ‘bow’? “Well, why not!” he giggles.   

Daniel and his twin brother (the Booker-nominated novelist Gabriel Krause) were born in London in 1986, the sons of Polish immigrants. They left Poland under political asylum as the communist movement crumbled and the solidarity movement gathered momentum. They went from Paris to London, before they were granted British citizenship in the late 1980s.

Their father is a satirical cartoonist, while the boys’ mother is an artist who Daniel says delighted in the cultural accessibility of the English capital “She took us to the British Museum, the Natural History Museum. My mother had the highest aspirations for Gabriel and me and both my parents did everything to give us a life that felt out of reach.”

Daniel fell in love with “the noise a violin makes” when he was four years-old, although he tells me that by the time he was 11: “I wanted to have a “normal” life. To not practise before school. To not practise after school. To breathe.

“I think that’s quite healthy. But I kept up with my scales…”

Here, Pioro pivots into one of his waspish tangents. “Scales!” he tuts. He’s angry that these basic planks of musicianship, these “extraordinary meditations” are often introduced to children as “something you won’t like”. He thinks social media also pushes a “toxic” scale regime too. “People on Instagram talk about scales as a feat of endurance. They say how many times they can repeat a technical exercise, thereby often missing the point. A scale isn’t there to be ‘conquered’. Nor is a piece of music. These people will realise one day that they’re wasting their time.” Pioro’s advice on scales? “Spend 10 minutes going from top G to bottom G and feel for moments of weakness and sureness. Break it down into a really useful, mathematical experience.”

Pioro, who studied at the Royal Academy of Music, grew up listening to virtuosos like Maxim Vengerov – whose recording of the Brahms’s sonatas he concedes is “beautiful”. But he fell out of love with that style of playing “in the old Russian school, influenced by the French Belgian school, all that approach to bow strokes which does teach you to be brilliant but leaves no room for extra thoughts.” He shudders. “In that style of playing you practise 10 hours a day. It’s awful – a sort of self-inflicted torture. This is why we sometimes get extraordinary players we then don’t hear about five years later because we’re talking about ‘burn out’.” 

On which note, Pioro also takes a swipe at “sinful” masterclasses in which he believes students are “made to feel like fools” by “artists showing off when they should know better”. He taps his tumbler. “Then we wonder why we have generations of neurotic young musicians. People end up hating their instruments!”

As a successful performer, Pioro is frustrated by the lack of rehearsal time afforded to orchestras. He notes that while a rock band might practise together for months before a gig, classical musicians are often expected to put shows together after a few hours, learning their parts separately and “papering over the cracks” in a few snatched hours. “I don’t want to bore the pants off anybody with this time issue, but it’s a big thing. We want artists to be artists, yet where is the time and space for this artistry?”

Nevertheless, Pioro is practical about the realities of life for orchestra members with multiple commitments. His wife works in the arts and he does a lot of the childcare. He tells me his son loves listening to him play, that watching this infant ignited by music he hears for the first time causes Pioro to question – again – why the classical establishment doesn’t do more to promote new music. “I am struck by the artistic apathy when it comes to championing the new. Old music is fine. It has already survived – because it’s amazing and we’ve totally forgotten about all the old music that was not very good because it’s just not played any more. I’m questioning why we’ve got into a place where we are so content to not seek out new sounds.”

He continues: “Last year a concert by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was advertised simply as ‘Tchaikovsky’s Fifth’. It took some friends to tell me that they would also be playing Cassandra Miller’s new viola concerto, and getting [viola player] Lawrence Power to perform it – this should have been the thing on everybody’s lips. For the first time in a long while I cried in a concert. I still think about it every day. So why wasn’t it advertised more prominently? It wouldn’t have bothered Tchaikovksy or the people who wanted to hear his Fifth!” 

Pioro stresses he’s “not interested in riling traditionalists. If you want to pull on a ruff and silk stockings then go for it. Amazing!” 

Daniel Pioro is one of four featured musicians at this year’s Aldeburgh Festival which runs from June 7-23. Info: brittenpearsarts.org/featured-musician-daniel-pioro