Review 6/2016

…the ’tendernessful’ (if such a word may be allowed to exist) beauty of the viola sound, resourceful agogics and inexhaustible variations in both dynamics and tempo gave Hindemith’s music a whole new dimension, most attractive to the ear…

On Tuesday, April 5, 2016 (in the Martinů Hall, Prague), the production of the Concert Art Exhibition festival presented its audience with a program featuring the youthful violist Kristina Fialová, accompanied by the flawless Igor Ardašev, in Bohuslav Martinů’s Sonata for Viola and Piano. The rendering started with an ostensibly forceful stroke in the piano, the power of which was immediately justified by the no less dynamically accentuated entry of the viola. Evidently, it was the power and timbre of this instrument—employed in a broad range of expression and force—which made Martinů’s composition such a marvelous musical experience. For his own part, Ardašev was never stingy with dynamics, not even in the solo passages: in the acoustic of the chamber concert hall of the Academy of Music, this made a welcome and refreshing impression. Kristina Fialová captivated her audience with a colorful richness in her thoroughly engaging timbre. In the lower registers, her instrument exuded a charming seductiveness, while higher up it sounded quite manfully. Sustained directly, without vibrato, it came across as stylistically trustworthy.

The interpretive assurance of the Fialová-Ardašev duo was undiminished also in the second composition on the program, Paul Hindemith’s Fantasy. The ’tendernessful’ (if such a word may be allowed to exist) beauty of the viola sound, resourceful agogics and inexhaustible variations in both dynamics and tempo gave Hindemith’s music a whole new dimension, most attractive to the ear. Kristina Fialová plays an instrument manufactured by the Milanese violin- and viola-maker Carlo Antonio Testore in 1745.