The playing of Thomas Zehetmair is characterised by a palpable conscientiousness, pervading the varied recordings selected here. He studied violin with his father Helmut at the Salzburg Mozarteum (where both his parents were teachers) and made his debut at the Salzburg Festival when he was sixteen, participating in master-classes given by Nathan Milstein and Max Rostal. His fastidious approach to learning and performing music is notably borne out in the ethos of his highly successful Zehetmair Quartet. Reacting in frustration to the ubiquitous practice of learning and rehearsing a chamber work just a few days before performance at a festival, the members now devote themselves to learning just one programme for each season and play from memory both in concert and in the recording studio. The Quartet has received numerous accolades for its recordings, including the Deutscher Schallplattenpreis, The Gramophone Record of the Year, Diapason d’Or and Edison Award.
Zehetmair’s activities extend to conducting: he has appeared with various top European orchestras and in the dual role of soloist-director has worked with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie and the UK’s Northern Sinfonia.
His Baroque performances demonstrate a collation of period techniques and approaches with which we have become familiar (careful phrasing and small-scale focus upon juxtaposed material, etc) wedded to the cleanliness of sound we expect from modern performers. This works well in the 1997 Vivaldi Concerto RV583, which is full of energy and varied textures, but in the Bach E major (1994) it can be a little patchy: the finale, for example, has a pleasing dance-like character, whilst the first movement becomes a little mannered in its carefully-thought-through phrasing. The Stravinsky Concerto in D (2006) has a good command of texture, colour and rhythmic vibrancy, although the Bartók Concerto (1995) somehow never seems to quite get going in the first movement, even though this is a very sensitive reading. How one reacts to Zehetmair’s 2006 Brahms Concerto is very much a matter of personal taste: some may praise the lavish use of a wide vibrato in the slow movement, for example, whilst others may find its tremulousness rather over-done (and certainly very far from the mannerism of Joachim, the work’s dedicatee). This said, there is a good sense of small-scale shape and gesture in the first movement, which again shows us Zehetmair’s creditable ethos of fastidious consideration.
© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Milsom (A–Z of String Players, Naxos 8.558081-84)