At age 35, German violist Tabea Zimmermann is at a career peak.
This month she’ll premiere a work, written for her by British composer
Sally Beamish, with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. She’ll also
perform a new composition by Markus Pinscher with the Sharoun Ensemble
in Berlin. In March, in Bremen, she’ll play another piece written
for her by German composer Wolfgang Rihm. With a new recording out,
Jewish Chamber Music (Haenssler CD 93.008), she also has
a forthcoming disc of Schumann works to be released on Capriccio
and a sonata recital with pianist Christian Ivaldi, which includes
the Franck Sonata, coming soon on BIS.
In September 2000 her world seemed to fall apart when her husband
of 13 years and father of her two children, conductor David Shallon,
died suddenly of an asthma attack while on tour in Tokyo. Music
director of the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg and the Jerusalem
Symphony Orchestra, Shallon had been her companion for most of her
adult life, says Zimmermann courageously. "We were each other’s
best friends, best pair of ears, and advisors. "I learned from David
to see and understand more about the structure of the works we played.
We worked many times on the viola repertoire, always trying to look
at it as chamber music on a larger scale, to work together with
orchestras, and to try out new ideas every time we repeated the
same pieces." She adds, "We struggled for a long time to find a
better balance between individual careers and our shared ideas,
finally finding a good solution in playing approximately ten to
14 weeks together each season, which enabled us both to play and
enjoy a family life, which we both wanted so much. David’s love
gave me the support to continue to develop my own musicality, to
go my own way, and I feel his support even now that I have to be
so independent."
Born in 1966 in the sleepy city of Lahr in Germany’s Black Forest,
she started playing viola at age three, guided by a man she calls
the best possible first teacher, Dietmar Mantel, "who knew how to
get the best out of every kid." For this reason, she feels that
later, she never had to "get rid of bad old habits, but could always
build on what I had learned in the first ten years." Piano playing,
from age five on, was as important to her as the viola, and only
at age 13 did she choose the latter as her main focus. She studied
for six years with Ulrich Koch in Freiburg, and started picking
up first prizes in international competitions: Geneva in 1982, Paris
in 1983, and Budapest in 1984. Koch had a good understanding of
her personality and knew that she could handle the pressure of a
competition, she recalls. "Being a teacher myself today, I find
it important to look at the student’s personality before going into
such a difficult situation."
Since winning the Maurice Vieux Competition in 1983, she has played
a viola by Etienne Vatelot (1980) given as first prize. She says,
"I love this instrument, because it gives me all the possibilities
to fully express myself in all the styles. It can be played strong
or soft, aggressive or tender, and it will always respond to that
playing in a beautiful way. It’s a comfortable size (41 1/2 cm,
or 16 1/3 inches), is pretty insensitive to changes in weather,
and is simply a good partner in the traveling involved in my solo
career. It can sound violin-like or cello-like, depending on the
context." She owns four bows, two modern German ones (by Richard
Grünke and Hans-Karl Schmidt) and two old French ones (by Sartory
and Voirin), which she selects according to the given performance.
The year 1984 was a fruitful one. She studied with Sandor Végh
in Salzburg. "I feel today that this year was the most important
for me, because I learned how to listen and to play in a less instrumental
way." Indeed, her playing became and remained a vocal ideal, especially
after the gifted and inventive pianist Hartmut Holl persuaded her
to join him in epoch-making concerts of Schubert’s "Die Winterreise"
alongside mezzo-soprano Mitsuko Shirai and poet Peter Haertling.
They juxtaposed instrumental interludes and recitation were with
the lieder cycle. With her creamy tone and dark good looks, Zimmermann
became known after these concerts (preserved on Capriccio 10 382/83)
as the "Kathleen Ferrier of the viola," a reference to the lovely
and well-loved British contralto. She states, "I learned so much
during this working process, and am still learning a lot every time
[Hartmut Holl and I] play together . . . I learned how to feel and
identify with a situation in a song and how to look for the least
technical solution on my viola to express myself in that given situation."
She has attracted the attention of distinguished composers like
György Ligeti, who approached her after a 1990 concert and
said, "Zimmermann, I am Ligeti. If you continue playing like this,
I will write a piece for you." Sure enough, he produced a solo sonata
in 1994 (recorded on Sony SK 62309), the preparation for which she
terms "the hardest I have ever done, because he asked for incredible
challenges both instrumentally and emotionally. He is a composer
who knows exactly what he wants and how he wants it done, but it
is difficult for an interpreter to master all the challenges and
to feel exactly the way Ligeti felt when writing it. I think composers
and performers are dependent on each other. As a player, you have
to identify totally and then reinvent or recompose the written piece
so that it can sound fully convincing. As a composer, you have to
accept the fact that by the time the music has moved from your mind
to a piece of paper it already is subject to interpretation."
A devoted teacher at the Frankfurt Hochschule für Musik, Zimmermann
seems to be maturing and learning about life from music and vice
versa. Another new work, Menachem Wiesenberg’s Monodialogue, gives
her "a lot of opportunities to bring in my whole personality, many
different characters, never a strict tempo, everything in motion
all the time. Life is a constant change."
