Page 234 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

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.”

Daniel Pioro performing at the Hay Festival CREDIT: Tracey Paddison/Shutterstock

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?”