BLINK IF YOU DARE

Daniel Pioro is a violinist to watch – uncompromising about speaking his mind, whether it comes to challenging mediocrity, championing new works or combining ancient and modern. He talks to Tom Stewart about his philosophy, his new album, and the fresh ideas he is bringing to his ongoing residency at London’s Southbank Centre

DAVID JAMES GRINLY

The cries of a baby bounce between the bare concrete walls of British violinist Daniel Pioro’s home, not far from London’s Barbican Centre. His son is just a few months old, and Pioro, 36, is keen to lead by example from the start. ‘All my life I’ve said no to stuff very confidently,’ he explains. ‘Now, suddenly, it’s even more important to ask why I’m doing something, and not just because of the time I’m spending away from home. I want my son to learn to do the same: to ask himself, before he agrees to do anything, why he’s saying yes.’ If he’s anything like his father, this is a child likely to know his own mind. Over the next hour, Pioro speaks emphatically about the kind of music making he enjoys (with ample rehearsal time, opportunities to build relationships and often, but not always, new repertoire) and the kind he would rather avoid (everything else).

In the past twelve months, Pioro has become a father, made an eclectic new recording – about to be released – that spans almost a millennium of music, and curated a series of performances at London’s Southbank Centre, where he is artist-in-residence for the 2022–3 season. Pioro was born in the UK to Polish parents, both visual artists, and, for the most part, his CV is focused on new music. After graduating from London’s Royal Academy of Music in 2010, he became leader of the London Contemporary Orchestra, a group that has become known for looking outside the classical world for its ear- and eye-opening programmes. He left in 2016 and continued leading a contemporary music ensemble for three years before releasing Dust, an album of new music for violin and electronics. He gave the premiere of Jonny Greenwood’s Horror vacui at the BBC Proms in 2019, in 2021 he premiered Tom Coult’s Pleasure Garden, and Thomas Adès’s Violin Concerto features in his repertoire.

But there’s more to it than that. To get a sense of the kind of musician Pioro is today, the programmes of his Southbank Centre appearances act as a sort of map. Sunday 22 January sees him in devotional mode, with a day-long performance of Biber’s complete Mystery (Rosary) Sonatas alongside James McVinnie on the organ and harpsichord. Fifteen Baroque meditations on the life of Christ might seem an unusual choice for someone steeped in new music. However, as Pioro explains, he was drawn to the music’s devotional intensity, as well as to the unusual resonances created by the different ways Biber requires the instrument to be tuned. ‘It was James who first introduced me to them,’ he says. ‘I’m not religious myself, but when I really looked at the score I suddenly felt like one of the most devout people on earth. The music, and the dedication that Biber so evidently put into creating it, really is awesome.’

Pioro plays Jonny Greenwood’s Horror vacui at the BBC Proms in 2019

MARK ALLAN/BBC

Pioro is particularly drawn to the sixth sonata (‘The Agony in the Garden’), which also appears on his new release, Saint Boy. A reflection on the evening before the Crucifixion, it requires the player to tune the lower pair of strings a semitone higher and the top strings each a tone lower, creating a whole array of gnawing dissonances. ‘There’s a vibration in sound that just doesn’t allow anything to settle,’ Pioro says. ‘Some of the sonatas, like this one, are racked with agony and torment, some of them are joyful and full of celebration, and some are filled with awe and mysticism.’ Between each of the 15 pieces Pioro and McVinnie will improvise on the unusual sonorities created by the different tunings, and the whole performance will begin at the moment the morning light strikes the Thames. ‘Without mocking religious devotion at all, my view is that if a person who believes in Jesus came to our performance of the sonatas, they wouldn’t need to go to church that day.’

‘MY VIEW IS THAT IF A PERSON WHO BELIE VES IN JESUS CAME TO OUR PERFORMANCE OF THE BIBER SONATAS, THEY WOULDN’T NEED TO GO TO CHURCH THAT DAY’

For a player so embedded in the new music landscape, Pioro seems unusually dedicated to the music of the Baroque. A performance at the Southbank Centre in May 2023 (the culmination of his residency) will feature none other than Vivaldi’s perennial Four Seasons, albeit followed by Vortex temporum by Grisey, a French composer known for exploring the most fundamental elements of sound. ‘One way of looking at it is that The Four Seasons is incredibly overplayed, and usually in a very unimaginative way,’ Pioro says. ‘But this music is popular for a reason, right? There’s a limit to how bad a performance of it can be. The more positive way of looking at things is to see it as an invitation to play with the score in new ways.’ It would be a ‘waste’, he says, not to look at things afresh.

The best known ‘update’ of Vivaldi’s original is probably Max Richter’s ‘recomposed’ version of 2012, but Pioro hasn’t done anything to the music itself. Instead, just like the interpolated Biber improvisations, he has leafed something new between each of the four concertos. Or rather, a new reimagining of something old. Early editions of the work include four sonnets, one for each season, possibly written by the composer himself. Each line (for example, ‘birds celebrate spring’s return with festive song’, ‘north winds course through the house’ and so on) is printed at an appropriate point in the score, but the poems are rarely, if ever, heard today. Pioro’s performance will include new versions of them by British poet Michael Morpurgo, who will read them out himself. The two first worked together in 2015, when Pioro performed in a stage adaptation of Morpurgo’s Holocaust novel for children, The Mozart Question, and they have remained close. ‘Michael’s poems take their inspiration from Vivaldi’s sonnets; they’re extrapolations of all the ideas in the music that performers don’t often bring out. There are the sounds of stamping feet, the southern breeze and a barking dog, for example. It’s like a conversation between Michael and Vivaldi.’

Pioro with organist and harpsichordist James McVinnie

ALEX KOZOBOLIS

Pioro plainly thinks there’s life yet in some of the most familiar repertoire out there. The first performance of his Southbank Centre residency included none other than The Lark Ascending, and he has recently performed warhorses including Bruch’s Second Violin Concerto and the Brahms ‘Double’ Concerto – these two coming with a vanishingly short period of rehearsal, something that any orchestral player anywhere would not find surprising and which, Pioro argues, undermines the point of performing the music at all. ‘These things are like jokes. It’s the ridiculous, painful and quite shameful side of our industry, the side that doesn’t benefit music in any way. The Bruch is an interesting example because it had something like a one-hour rehearsal on the morning of the performance and is symbolic of the sort of music making I do not want to do.’ For many professional groups, money has never been tighter, and market conditions clearly impact on the ability of organisations to pay staff and venue costs for longer rehearsals. ‘I have immense admiration for the people who run these big groups. They agree that things aren’t right and so do the players.’ His comments aren’t mockery, he says; they’re a call to arms.

Still, isn’t he worried about burning bridges? ‘In the end, I couldn’t care less what people think,’ he continues. ‘If people and orchestras and other institutions want to say, publicly, that they’re happy with mediocrity and churning out the same thing over and over, that’s on them.’ He believes that if these people don’t want to work with an artist who really wants to engage with the music, then so be it. So why does he take on this type of engagement? ‘We’ve got ourselves into a routine where you can’t say every project is suddenly going to have four days of rehearsal. It has to be more gradual; there needs to be a stepping stone. If I never did that kind of work, I would never be in a position to engage with conductors and ensembles to try to convince them to work more deeply, or across longer timescales.’

Of course, many of Pioro’s peers spend most of their time cramming things into ever decreasing amounts of rehearsal time, and performing a relatively small number of works taken from the ‘standard’ repertoire of more or less familiar music. ‘I hope that those people are as obsessed with their instruments and their playing when they’re old as they are when they’re young,’ he says. ‘And if they are, well, what a blessed and heavenly life to live. I love it when people are true to themselves and their passions.’ Clearly, Pioro’s passions lie elsewhere.

He’s in friendlier territory for the third of his Southbank Centre performances, alongside viol player Liam Byrne and producer and electronic musician Valgeir Sigurðsson, with whom Pioro has worked for many years as part of Icelandic record label and artistic collective Bedroom Community. The programme, which includes music by all three, reflects the side of him that we hear on his 2019 album Dust and now on Saint Boy. As we’ve come to expect from Pioro, however, there’s familiar repertoire hiding behind the strikingly beautiful cover art and enigmatic title of the latter (named after a horse in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics that was punched by its rider and her coach after refusing to jump – areference to Pioro’s stand against doing things he’d rather not). As well as sparse and crystalline music by contemporary composers Laurence Crane and Lilja María Ásmundsdóttir, there’s Bach, Biber and Hildegard von Bingen, and Pioro’s delicate solo violin version of Tartini’s ‘Devil’s Trill’ Sonata that contains long improvised passages but never loses its essentially Baroque sensibility. It feels like Pioro is taking the most ‘obvious’ bits of repertoire he can find, stitching them together in ways that confound tradition and daring his listeners to blink.

Pioro peforms The Lark Ascending with the LPO and conductor Andrew Manze (see Concerts, page 82)

‘THE WORLD IS FULL OF CURIOUS PEOPLE – WE SHOULD GIVE THEM SOMETHING TO LISTEN TO'

Pioro (left) with Jonny Greenwood (bass guitar) and members of BBC NOW play Steve Reich’s Pulse at the 2019 BBC Proms

SOUTHBANK PHOTO LONDON PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA. PROMS PHOTO MARK ALLAN/BBC

A short, five-minute track from the album, Copenhagenbased composer Nick Martin’s Kołysanka, was released as a single in October. Its long, keening lines are passed between Pioro and a string quartet, supported by the soft, almost dusty sound of a chamber organ played by Katherine Tinker. The sound is reminiscent of Tavener’s The Protecting Veil, with an almost transcendental quality that isn’t lost on Pioro. ‘The disc was always going to be a combination of ancient and modern music, with a devotional aspect to the sound,’ he explains. ‘When I listened to Nick’s original, for soprano and strings, I thought it was perhaps the most exquisite example I’d hear of what I was looking for. It’s full of these beautiful, romantic, pining sounds and, unusually for this kind of thing, it’s a miniature’ – which means it’s easy to fit into a programme. It’s Martin’s own arrangement of the piece, which takes its name from the Polish word for ‘lullaby’, that we hear in the recording.

At its heart, Pioro’s work is a juxtaposition of old and new, of tradition and subversion. Familiarity is a useful tool for opening minds to new possibilities, he says, and he sees signs that others agree. ‘I don’t know what’s happened to Wigmore Hall, but I thought I was having a fever dream when they announced that one of their new resident ensembles was Apartment House,’ he says of the venue’s partnership with the experimental new music group. ‘There are still the Beethoven quartet cycles and the all-Haydn programmes, but they also had Apartment House interpreting the drawings of Louise Bourgeois. Again, I thought that one was an April Fool.’ It gives him reason to hope that a more open-minded attitude may be on the horizon. ‘No one’s asking people to take a risk with everything they do, but simply to offer a path into that universe. The world is full of curious people – we should give them something to listen to.’

Saint Boy is released on 13 January on Platoon. Daniel Pioro and James McVinnie perform Biber at London’s Southbank on 22 January