Page 233 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

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 Pioro performing at the Late Night With Jonny Greenwood Prom in 2019 CREDIT: Mark
Allen

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