Jiri Pinkas
It was the year 1859, and, in a violin-maker’s workshop in Prague, under the hands of Ferdinand Augustus Homolka, the instrument was produced which then had a significant influence on my journey through musical life. 141 years later, I was enrolled as a violin student at the Academy of Performing Arts, Prague, and I was told about a very interesting viola which lay resting in a cupboard in the school’s archives, waiting for someone who’d grasp a bunch of horsehair and help it come alive. While I was gathering courage for the courtship with this viola, members of Bennewitz Quartet approached me announcing that they were looking for someone who’d feel like looking after the third line of the quartet score. This turned out to be the decisive moment.I became the violist of the Bennewitz Quartet. But the beginnings were more difficult than I’d expected. The main problem appeared at the very beginning of that third line – because there was the C-clef… Three weeks after the wedding with Bennewitz Quartet, at summer master classes in Austria, we won the Béla Bartók Prize Competition.
If some of the jurors had found out that I still couldn’t read the C-clef, and so had to transpose my whole viola part painstakingly, they might have been quite amused. Back then, this experience was, for me, just the beginning of the quartet music adventure. Homolka’s viola definitely sent me in the right direction, and, since the time I completed my studies at the Academy, I’ve been remembering it with nostalgia. Now, it’s waiting again in the cupboard in the school’s archives – for the next adventurer.
