Pavel Sporcl and Paganini

"He's really difficult, and in today's digital world he's even more difficult because your playing has to be almost 100 percent.  I don't think anybody can do that, and on some tracks you can say with closed eyes that's 100 percent, but on some of them for me it's not possible.  I don't  think even Paganini himself played 100 percent!

"I like to compare Paganini's playing to athletics.  If you watch today's runners in the 100 metres you know they run like crazy, and if you see some old athletics film from the beginning of the last century they run really slow and they are very strange looking.  I think for Paganini it had to be almost the same.

"I like Paganini very much.  His music is even more difficult to play once you realise that it's not only technique.  If it was only technique then after fifteen minutes it would be boring.  I think Paganini puts so much into it, plus you have to try and play all of the technical moments melodically and in an Italianate way, which makes it much more hard than just playing the notes."

Click here to sample Pavel Sporcl playing Paganini's Allegro vivace a movimento perpetuo, Op.11, accompanied by Petr Jirikovsky, and buy.