‘A Strad can throw you off’: Frank Peter Zimmermann on his instruments and bows

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This is an excerpt from The Strad April 2025 feature, ’Frank Peter Zimmermann: “Music that possesses you”’. Read the full article here

I’ve been playing the ‘Lady Inchiquin’ Stradivari (above) since the beginning of 2001, except between February 2015 and April 2017, when I played on many different Strads and a Guarneri ‘del Gesù’. The good Charles Beare spontaneously lent me his ‘del Gesù’ because I had to return the ‘Lady’ quite abruptly in February 2015, three days before my 50th birthday and my Sibelius week with the New York Philharmonic.

Until the very last minute, I had hoped to reach an agreement with the bank that owned the violin. Then a series of Strads arrived, sometimes only for a month. In October 2015, after a concert, I met a Mr Yu from China. He kindly lent me the ‘General Dupont, Grumiaux’ Stradivari (1727). To be quite honest, it wasn’t my voice, and not so easy to play either. I probably would have needed two or three years to understand all these Stradivaris properly.

Nathan Milstein once told me that it took him five years to understand his ‘Maria Teresa’ of 1716. I believe that all Stradivari violins have their own individual personality. The player has to adapt to that. It’s different in the case of violins by ‘del Gesù’ – you can bend them to your will. A Strad is pretentious. It throws you off, like you are a rider who isn’t properly seated.

In the end, I was thankfully reunited with the ‘Lady Inchiquin’ as a result of the North Rhine–Westphalia government offering it to me on long-term loan after having purchased it.

My main bow is a Dominique Peccatte; I use this to create the golden sound needed for repertoire from Beethoven to Elgar and Sibelius. I also have an exact copy of this Peccatte, made by the fantastic bow maker Tino Lucke from Berlin. I primarily use this one for classical modernism: Bartók, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Hindemith, Martinů and others.

I also have two Tubbs bows, one gold-mounted, the other silver-mounted – the latter a true gem in sound, like a Tourte. I recorded the Bach Sonatas and Partitas with it. I acquired the Peccatte and the Tubbs bows from my close friend Michel Schwalbé, who was concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic during Herbert von Karajan’s time.

INTERVIEW BY THOMAS EISNER