Covid has affected people in all sorts of ways, but one positive outcome at least has been the chance it gave some of us to step off the treadmill, stop rushing around, and take stock of the things we feel are important to us. Such has been the case for violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann, who before lockdown was giving about 90 concerts a year, mostly concertos with top-name orchestras around the world. ‘I wouldn’t say I was overdoing it’, he says, ‘but still, after the shutdown I was surprised how long it took for me to come back to myself after 35 years. Even after two months off I was still completely in this former life, always thinking when my next dates were, waking up in the night and wondering if I still have time to practise for them.’

He seems settled enough now, though. Another result of pandemic conditions is that almost all interviews have had to be done online, which means that when I talk to artists they are usually in their own homes, rather than in some scruffy backstage room or even (as on one occasion) a taxi. Zimmermann’s home is near Cologne, and in the last two years he has enjoyed the extra time to do the things that help him relax. ‘I’ve had some nice countryside walks with my wife along the Rhine. I’m also reading a lot, and I’m a movie lover so I’m watching a lot of films – French, arthouse, and I love Hitchcock and Buñuel.’

Frank Peter Zimmermann (photograph: Irène Zandel)

But he has not been musically idle. Lockdown has at last provided the ideal opportunity to confront something that looms over all violinists, an area of repertoire they all know they must address at some time in their lives. Thirty years ago, Zimmermann told Gramophone (7/92): ‘Bach is very hard for me, because I have a special idea of how to play the solo works which would forbid me to play any other music while I attempt to realise it. Sometimes I think I may stop playing for a year and just play Bach – lock myself in a church. Or in a wine cellar!’ He laughs now when I remind him. ‘Exactly – it’s still the same! I’d never really made enough time for myself before to go into this incredible world of solo Bach, but during lockdown I was playing only the Six Sonatas and Partitas. I’d played some in the past, but now I could go through them in a much more relaxed way. So I jumped into the ice-cold water!’

Inevitably, a recording project has resulted (for BIS), likewise enacted at Zimmermann’s newfound leisurely pace. ‘We went in June 2020 to a church near Cologne Airport which normally we couldn’t use because of the aeroplanes and I recorded the D minor Partita – which I had played before, but a long time ago – and the A minor Sonata, which I’d played movements from more recently as encores. But I said to the record company, “Please don’t expect too much. It may be that I will stop halfway through, or that even after the edit I will think it’s not good enough.” But it went quite well, and I thought, OK, I must complete one disc, so I recorded the E major Partita last March in Stockholm.’

‘It’s a constant search for where the voice goes … You are always needing different colours and different long and short notes’

Such caution seems surprising from a high-powered soloist whose playing seldom betrays signs of technical tussle. So what is it that makes Bach’s solo violin music a project requiring so much time and care? ‘When you play Bach you have to somehow forget everything else you learned about violin-playing,’ he replies. ‘It’s so pure and so naked, and the technique required is different to anything else. I was always afraid of playing Bach and mixing it with other composers, but then that’s the problem with being an all-rounder like me, who plays all the repertoire. You have to adjust to each style, and today you cannot play Bach’s music the same way you play Elgar or Wieniawski.’

This first volume of Bach solo works clearly presents the ones Zimmermann felt most comfortable and familiar with, and certainly to hear them you would not suspect a background of struggle or doubt. But he is clear about the obstacles. ‘The partitas I find most challenging, especially the short dance movements, which each need to have their own character. I must say I struggled most with the courantes, for instance in the D minor, where you have to find the right articulation to make it sparkle. Also in the Allemande, where the overtones of the open D string are in danger of making the whole violin sound like a dark organ. The shaping of these movements is exceptionally difficult. I was struggling a lot with them in the weeks leading up to the recording, and even during it. The E major is a different story. There are problems with intonation – it’s quite difficult to make it sound right. And there are some movements, like the Minuets I and II and the Loure, where you really need to study how good Baroque musicians play. I listened to some great harpsichordists, and also to Murray Perahia, and it made me think I have to play them in a very light, dancing way. This piece is supposed to be the “easy” last work of the cycle, but in a way it’s the simplicity that makes it so complex. The A minor Sonata is my favourite. The proportions of the piece are just perfect – each of the four movements has its own world, but they all have such quality too. It’s a challenge to uphold this breadth, especially in the third-movement Andante, which is so beautiful. I’ve played this movement in concert, but I think it’s music you have to play for your own pleasure.’

‘In the Beethoven sonatas, the pianist has to challenge you, they have to be a great player to allow you to surf the big wave’

‘Style’ is a word that is never far away when talking about Bach’s violin music; thoughts on how to play it have changed a lot in recent decades, especially since the advent of period instruments. In this regard, Zimmermann’s own relationship with it has been something of a journey. ‘I had teachers who were very conservative. They played Bach like Szeryng would in the ’50s and ’60s. In the E major Partita I remember Herman Krebbers continually asking me to use vibrato. It was difficult for me to get out of that grip.’ Did it feel wrong at the time? ‘Actually not so much, because you know Szeryng was my god for Bach. Milstein used less vibrato but very much in his own style. And Grumiaux I always thought was the most sensitive Bach player. But the kind of playing we hear nowadays from Rachel Podger or someone like that, this I only discovered about 15 years ago.’

Listening to the other Bach recordings Zimmermann has made over the years shows how his approach has changed. The weighty lyricism of the concertos recorded with Jeffrey Tate and the English Chamber Orchestra in 1989 (‘much influenced by Oistrakh’, says Zimmermann) are a world away from the lithe quickness of his versions with the modern-instrument, period-influenced Berliner Barock Solisten released in 2017 (‘I think we were in a good swing, with good speaking, good articulation’). In between, in 2007, came exceptionally beautiful accounts of the sonatas for violin and keyboard with pianist Enrico Pace (‘already in a different style, but I had not gone the whole way – let’s say I was halfway through the tunnel’). Zimmermann has listened to and learned from period-instrument players (‘I’m a big fan of Andrew Manze’), but cites as one of the most important influences the two years he spent working on the Goldberg Variations (recorded in 2019) with the string trio he set up with viola player Antoine Tamestit and cellist Christian Poltéra. ‘It educated me a lot. We agreed we would all start from the same basic non-vibrato, shaping each note and letting the instrument articulate only through the bow stroke, instead of from the more Romantic style I’d grown up with where every note was played beautifully with wonderful vibrato.’

Volume 1 of the Bach solos is released next month in the UK, and the C major Sonata and parts of the G minor are now in the can, so it sounds like Zimmermann is well on his way to completion. But wait – there are demons still.

‘The B minor Partita, my weak point. I never played it before, and only started in the last few days.’ He bemoans another awkward key for intonation, but it seems the difficulties are more interpretational than technical, not least the voicing of the contrapuntal parts hidden or hinted at in Bach’s single lines of music. ‘It’s a constant search for where the voice goes: is this the upper one, or the lower one, or the middle? You are always needing different colours and different long or short notes. In the Courante it seems to be always the same articulation, but in a way it should not be; it should be in a different articulation when you repeat it, sometimes long and sometimes short. It’s a very difficult process to go through. I don’t know if it will come out well, and maybe I won’t record it.’ Zimmermann sounds quite at ease with this idea, it has to be said. BIS boss Robert van Bahr may have to do some sweet-talking.

One important cycle Zimmermann has recently completed for BIS, however, is the Beethoven sonatas with pianist Martin Helmchen, performances which, said Gramophone’s Richard Bratby (11/20), ‘wed classical verve to a profoundly Romantic spirit’. Here, one suspects, things fell into place rather more readily. ‘I’d been searching for a pianist with the same direction as me for almost 30 years. I failed many times until I got fed up and started with the string trio instead. And through recording all the Beethoven trios with them I learned again how to tackle the sonatas. I’m so happy about that, because if I had done the sonatas first they would have sounded totally different!’

Zimmermann first met Helmchen in 2008 when the young German pianist stood in for Christian Zacharias for two concerts in the piano trio Zimmermann was in with cellist Heinrich Schiff, but it would be another 10 years before they had the chance to work together as a duo. ‘I always find with pianists that you only have to play two or three notes together, and you just know. It’s like buying shoes – the shoe either fits or it doesn’t. And yes, you can say that the Bach Sonatas and Partitas are the Old Testament of violin music and the Beethoven sonatas the New Testament, but in the Beethoven the piano part is the major part of the cycle, the violin is carried by the piano, so you need someone who will play the piano part as seriously as if they were playing the Pathétique. And you need someone who can make a smaller sound, someone like Martin who has a real feel for working with a string player. You cannot compete when the pianist has a huge sound – in the C minor Sonata you would be gone, vanished! On the other hand, he or she has to challenge you, they have to be a great player to allow you to surf the big wave.’

The Beethoven cycle was largely completed in pre-Covid times, as was another recently praised recording of the two Martin≤ concertos (‘How Martin≤ should always be played’ was Guy Rickards’s verdict when he made it his Recording of the Month, 1/21) coupled with a Bartók Solo Violin Sonata ‘suffused with light’. But apart from the Bach, Zimmermann tells me that last summer he recorded Martin≤’s Suite concertante along with Bartók’s two Rhapsodies, ‘but still something is missing for the album, so we’re going to record the Stravinsky Concerto’. There are unconfirmed plans to record the Schumann Concerto and Fantasie, perhaps with Hindemith’s Kammermusik No 4, as well as cycles of the Bartók and Brahms sonatas, including Brahms’s own violin versions of the clarinet sonatas (‘Brahms changed some parts in the piano where the violin cannot go so low, so he really did want them to be played on the violin’). Meanwhile, concert plans include a return to the Elgar Concerto, a piece he hasn’t played since the noughties. ‘I think I can do it better now – I will really dig into it!’ But there are other works he doesn’t think he will be returning to. ‘I booked some dates to do the Walton, but now I think it’s probably a piece that’s better for a younger player. The Britten is great, but also perhaps for a younger age. And Prokofiev is a wonderful composer, but I’m not searching for that kind of music anymore – to go through all the scales and notes of the violin concertos … I must say I would prefer nowadays listening to someone play the Third Piano Concerto!’

Is this the start of a new approach to life for Zimmermann for the time to come when Covid recedes? ‘It will be the same life, but restricting myself more. I was already doing less intercontinental flying. I think I should take more breaks in future and give myself time to learn new music, even if I don’t perform it. I could get closer to it, absorb it in the way I just did with the Bach. I’ll be 57 soon, and I think I can allow myself more time to think things over.’

Our time is up, and as I reach for the ‘leave meeting’ button I wish Zimmermann luck with that B minor Partita. He chuckles. ‘This Bach is my Everest – let’s see if I can climb it!’

This article originally appeared in the March 2022 issue of Gramophone magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today