Daniel Pioro is no ordinary violin virtuoso. In his radical, bracingly open-minded approach to music making, nothing is taken for granted. For him, every performance is a special event, intended to stimulate an audience’s imagination and revaluate conventional norms. ‘My parents are both visual artists,’ Pioro points out, ‘so in a sense they do what I do. They speak to me about art and creativity and risk-taking without it ever being explicitly about the violin, which is a fantastic thing because I don’t have someone telling me what they’ve achieved on the violin with the implication I should follow them in some way, as though it was a pre-ordained path. Yet we can have the same conversation I would hope to have with a musician concerning fabricating things out of sound.’
‘One of the things my parents told me from a very early age,’ he continues, ‘is that it would be better to live in the street and be true to yourself artistically than simply follow norms unquestioningly. It allowed me to query things with a greater sense of the worstase scenario being
