Composers: Béla Bartók; Karol Szymanowski
Works: Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano, Sz. 75; Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano, Sz. 76; Mythes, Op. 30
Performers: Frank Peter Zimmermann, violin; Dmytro Choni, piano
Label: BIS
Catalog Number: BIS-2787
Format: SACD / Digital
Recorded: January and December 2024, Robert Schumann-Saal, Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf
Release Year: 2025
Duration: about 72–73 minutes
Frank Peter Zimmermann keeps showing up in repertory that lesser mortals use to prove how serious they are, and then ruining the self-importance by making it sound like music. This BIS disc gives him Bartók’s two violin sonatas and Szymanowski’s Mythes, with Dmytro Choni at the piano, and the program is exactly as tough and seductive as it looks on paper: modernist argument up front, impressionist-iridescent perfume at the end, all of it balanced on the edge between heat and control.
The Bartók sonatas are where the real work gets done. These pieces can sound like a masterclass in angles, attack, and cultural upheaval, which is fine if you enjoy homework. Zimmermann and Choni dodge that trap. They don’t sand down the difficulty, but they also don’t posture at it. What you hear instead is line, tension, and forward motion. The playing is fierce without turning feral, disciplined without going bloodless.
That matters most in the First Sonata, where Bartók still sounds like he’s wrestling late-Romantic rhetoric into a new, tougher language. The performance doesn’t over-romanticize the piece, but it doesn’t pretend the music sprang fully formed from some antiseptic modernist laboratory either. Zimmermann has the authority to dig into the score’s darker grain, and Choni gives him a piano part with backbone, not upholstery. The Second Sonata, more compressed and more elusive, benefits from the same refusal to make a manifesto out of the notes. They let the music stay strange. That’s harder than it sounds.
Then comes Mythes, which is either the ideal encore to Bartók or a complete change of weather, depending on your tolerance for moonlight. Szymanowski’s triptych needs color, tact, and a willingness to sound luxurious without collapsing into scented vapor. Zimmermann has always had the tonal control for that, and here he and Choni use it intelligently. After Bartók’s braced sinew, Szymanowski arrives like silk with nerves underneath. The contrast is the point.
Best of all, this is one of those recital discs that actually behaves like an album. The Bartók sonatas give it weight and argument; Mythes gives it shimmer and release. Zimmermann and Choni are too smart to oversell the concept, but they’re also too musical to pretend it isn’t there. The result is a record that feels curated instead of merely assembled.
So yes, it’s another Frank Peter Zimmermann release announcing that he remains one of the adults in the room. But it’s also something better: a disc that takes difficult, high-prestige repertoire and makes it vivid, playable, and worth replaying. Which, in classical music, is not nothing.
Grade: A-
