Pavel Sporcl

Czech violinist Pavel Sporcl has gained wide popularity with both traditional repertory and crossover and world music performances. He has used audience-friendly devices such as wearing a bandana and playing a blue violin, and he has worked to realize the goal of making classical music less forbidding for young people, in a part of the world where such initiatives are rarer than in the West. He has also given numerous concerts for young people and worked extensively with school groups. Sporcl was born April 25, 1973, in Ceske Budejovice in what was then Czechoslovakia. Sporcl grew up in a family that enjoyed both classical music and pop from the likes of Sweden's ABBA. He studied under Vaclav Snitil at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and then went on for further work in the U.S., remaining there for four years and taking lessons from Itzhak Perlman, Dorothy DeLay, Eduard Schmieder, and Masao Kawasaki. "I think in America you simply want a big sound more than in Europe," he has said. "In Europe you want more detail, musicality. In America it's more like a...I don't know...trumpet way of playing. In a good way, of course, not in a bad way. It’s simply because you have big halls and everybody in the hall wants to hear your sound." Extending the desire to communicate with audiences and realizing that even in the classical-rich Czech Republic young audiences were beginning to desert classical music, Sporcl adopted an informal performance style that included, at first, the pirate bandana; the blue violin, made by Jan Spidlen, came later. He has appeared with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the National Orchestra of France, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, among others, and has performed at the Salzburger Festspiele, Schleswig-Holstein, and Prague Spring festivals. After recording an album of music by Vivaldi and Astor Piazzolla for Arco Diva, Sporcl has released most of his albums on the Czech national label Supraphon. They have focused on Dvorák and other Czech and Eastern European composers, but have also included Paganini, a cycle of Bach's unaccompanied sonatas and partitas, and a crossover album, Sporcelain, featuring collaborations with Czech pop musicians. Sporcl has also recorded with his Gipsy Way and Gipsy Fire ensembles, which have given more than 270 performances internationally, including in China. With the former group he released the album Alla Zingarese in 2018. ~ James Manheim