Born in 1965 in Duisburg, Germany, Frank Peter Zimmermann was only five when he began playing violin; at ten he gave his first concert as soloist with an orchestra. Following studies with Valery Gradov, Saschko Gawriloff, and Herman Krebbers, he launched his international career in 1983. Since then he has appeared at all the major festivals and concertizes with renowned orchestras and conductors on both sides of the Atlantic. In the 2011-12 season he was artist-in-residence with the New York Philharmonic and the Bamberg Symphony; in addition he appeared in concert with Bernard Haitink and the Chicago Symphony, Juraj Valcuha and the Boston Symphony, Mariss Jansons and the Berlin Philharmonic, and Daniel Harding and the Filarmonica della Scala. As a chamber musician, Zimmermann performs around the world with such partners as the pianists Enrico Pace, Piotr Anderszewski, and Emanuel Ax. In 2007, together with violist Antoine Tamestit and cellist Christian Poltéra, he founded the Trio Zimmermann, whose recording of Beethoven was included in the German Record Critics’ best-of list in the spring of 2012. Frank Peter Zimmermann increasingly devotes himself to rarities of the repertoire and to contemporary music. In recent years he has given the world premieres of three violin concertos: Juggler in Paradise (2009) by Augusta Read Thomas, The Lost Art of Letter Writing (2007) by Brett Dean, and En sourdine (2003) by Matthias Pintscher. For his artistic accomplishments, Zimmermann was awarded the Premio dell’ Accademia Musicale Chigiana in 1990, the Rhenish Music Prize in 1994, the Music Prize of the City of Duisburg in 2002, and the Paul Hindemith Prize in 2010. He plays a Stradivarius from 1711, which was formerly owned by Fritz Kreisler.
LUCERNE FESTIVAL (IMF) debut on 25 August 1979 as part of the Young Artists series in works by Tartini, Beethoven, Ysaÿe, Webern, and Saint-Saëns.
May 2012