The young German violinist Frank-Peter Zimmermann (who is 21) is quoted on the sleeve as saying ''I am by no means a Paganini specialist, but I must say that practising the Caprices over a period of years has helped me very much in my development. For me they are true milestones, for if you practise and master Paganini, then everything else becomes easy (at least from the technical point of view)—except for Mozart. And I try to play Paganini just like Mozart, with the same transparency. It is my constant aim to make the enormous technical difficulties sound easy and to bring out the musical values. Because I am always searching for this musical refinement I play the Caprices again and again in public—it is precisely in front of an audience that one discovers new nuances. On such occasions great demands are made on my intonation and my powers of concentration: in Paganini you are lost if you do not keep one finger in position all the time.''
Listening to this record one certainly never for a moment feels that Zimmermann is in any danger of being 'lost': indeed, his technical command and his feeling for the musical shape of the pieces really do suggest that he has played them frequently in public—which is no small achievement for an artist of his age; and his allusion to Mozart is not so quixotic as it might seem, for classical purity of style is a salient feature of his playing throughout. In this respect his closest rival is, I feel, Schlomo Mintz on DG, yet by comparison Mintz's playing occasionally lacks fire and diablerie—surely an essential element in performig Paganini; not so that of Ruggiero Ricci, the pioneer of the Caprices on LP, whose 1960 Decca recording still sounds extraordinarly vivid and compelling. so far as sheer beauty of sound is concerned, I think I would still rate Itzhak Perlman on HMV the highest: his performances have a warmth and intensity that none of the others can quite match.
But Zimmermann's achievement is a formidable one. With the single exception of Var. 9 in the last Caprice (the one litered with left-hand pizzicatos) he is technically just about flawless, but he also brings to these fascinating and haunting pieces a sense of rhythm, tempo and line that raises them far above the level of virtuoso exercises: no wonder they made such a deep impression on giants such as Schumann, Liszt, Brahms and Rachmaninov! He uses two violins by Stradivarius: one of 1706 ( ''which speaks more easily'') for the first 12 Caprices, which he considers to be technically more difficult than the last 12, which he plays on an instrument of 1684 ( ''with a bigger tone''). The sleeve states that he plays all the repeats, but this is not strictly accurate since he omits those in Nos. 4 and 6, and plays only the first repeat on Nos. 7, 8 and 12. He still plays more repeats than any of his rivals, however, two of whom (Ricci and Mintz) go to the other extreme by making unwarranted repeats in the second section of each variation in No. 24, thereby upsetting the scheme of two eight-bar sections that Paganini planned so carefully. With nearly 45 minutes of music on each side (the break comes after No. 11 on Side 1) and absolutely no loss of quality, this HMV issue is in its way as much a technical tour de force as is Zimmermann's masterly playing.'