Zimmermann and Brahms’ Masterful Violin Concerto

Distinguished by innate musicianship, a gift for communication, and an irresistibly joyous spirit, conductor Rafael Payare began playing horn in Venezuela’s El Sistema program at age 14 and started his formal conducting studies in 2004 with José Antonio Abreu. Since winning Denmark’s prestigious Malko Competition for Young Conductors in 2012, his career has advanced rapidly. He was Chief Conductor and Music Director of the Ulster Orchestra from 2014 to 2019; has served as Principal Conductor of the Castleton Festival, founded by his mentor the late Lorin Maazel, since 2015; became Music Director of the San Diego Symphony in 2019, and three years later became Music Director of Canada’s Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. In recent years, Payare has conducted many of the world’s most prestigious orchestras, including those of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Zurich, Berlin, Vienna, London, Munich, Hamburg, and Paris, besides making important opera debuts at London’s Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; the Glyndebourne Festival; Stockholm’s Royal Swedish Opera; and the Royal Danish Opera.

Frank Peter Zimmermann is widely regarded as one of the foremost violinists of his generation. He has performed with all major orchestras in the world, such as the Vienna Philharmonic, with which he played for the first time in 1983 with Lorin Maazel in Salzburg; the Berlin Philharmonic with which he made his debut in 1985 with Daniel Barenboim; the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, all London orchestras, as well as all of the most prominent American orchestras. He is a regular guest at major music festivals, including Salzburg, Edinburgh and Lucerne.
Over the years, Mr. Zimmermann has built up an impressive discography on the Warner Classics, BIS, Sony Classical, Ondine, Hänsler, Decca, and ECM labels.
Born in 1965 in Duisburg, Germany, he started learning to play the violin with his mother when he was 5 years old. He studied with Valery Gradov, Saschko Gawriloff and Herman Krebbers.
Frank Peter Zimmermann plays the 1711 Antonio Stradivari violin “Lady Inchiquin”, which is kindly provided by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, “Kunst im Landesbesitz”.