Vasyl Popadiuk

Vasyl Popadiuk was born in Lviv in 1966 into a family of artists. His father, a renowned composer and pan flute player, dreamt of a flutist son. At four Vasyl chose the piano, and by six he had fallen in love with the violin — an outcome, the family story goes, predicted by a stranger before he was born. That love has stayed with him ever since.

At seven he entered Kyiv's Lysenko school for gifted children, and at eighteen the National Tchaikovsky Conservatory of Music. He served his military years in a Kyiv song-and-dance ensemble that played for the Chornobyl liquidators, then toured with Ukraine's Hopak National Ensemble, Kyiv's Gypsy Music Theatre Company and Volodymyr Nazarov's music theatre in Moscow, where he took up ten new instruments. Today he plays fifteen.

Those tours took him to royal and state stages: he performed for the late King Hussein of Jordan, and travelled in Mikhail Gorbachev's cultural entourage on a state visit to Spain, where he played for Queen Sofia. In 1988 he performed in a feature concert at the Calgary Winter Olympics.

Since 1997 he has lived and worked in Canada, and he now makes his home in Ottawa. He was a semi-finalist in CBC's Great Canadian Music Dream in 2003, was named Honoured Artist of Ukraine in 2009, and is often called the “Ukrainian Paganini”. Ian Gillan asked him to play on his solo album; Jesse Cook brought him in as a special guest and onto his album “Beyond Borders”; for years he appeared as special guest to guitarist Pavlo in Canada, the U.S. and the UK.

His five-piece band Papa Duke — a play on his surname, and on his reputation as the “duke” of gypsy violin — plays what he calls Gypsy World Fusion, with classical, jazz, latin and pop undertones. They have headlined Toronto's Harbourfront and the Burlington Jazz & Blues festival, played the Montreal Jazz Festival with Sophie Milman, and shared the stage with the Mississauga Symphony.

On 13 September 2026 he raises the flag at UAFest in Carleton Place with his violin, and returns to the Main Stage at 15:10 for his own set.