WWW.CLASSICAL SOURCE.COM, Douglas Cooksey:
…With Harold in Italy we entered an altogether different realm. Davis has always conducted this piece incomparably since he recorded it for HMV in 1963 with Yehudi Menuhin as violist, one of the very first recordings to bring Davis to the notice of the wider public. What set this performance apart was the quality of the collaboration with Tabea Zimmermann. She and Davis have performed the piece together previously and indeed the LSO Live recording is excellent. However, this was even better: now, Zimmermann does not simply play the piece, she becomes Harold. This was not so much a performance as an 'assumption'. In ‘Serenade' she almost becomes a person at once melancholy and standing slightly apart from the innocent joy which surrounds her and she has the priceless advantage of being a great soloist, fully able to ride the orchestral storm, as well as an instinctive chamber player. This was immediately evident in the subtlety of her interaction with the harp in the opening measures as well as in her ongoing involvement with the music even when she was not playing…
THE TIMES, 12/14/2007, Geoff Brown:
…Zimmermann's versatile musicality, her equal command of the lyrical sigh and the urgent thrust, guaranteed extra delight. How those spectral arpeggios in the Pilgrim's March shivered…
DAVID NICE, 12/14/2007:
…She has to be among today's most dramatic and involving performers, moving with the music and playing with the entry of the protagonist's liveliest tune in the first movement in a way that made me want to laugh out loud for joy. The quiet refrain in the shepherd's piping sequence, too, was mesmerising…
WWW.MUSICALCRITICISM.COM , Dominic Mc Hugh:
…Berlioz wrote a sort of anti-concerto in which the concertante element is unconventional, often incorporating the viola into the orchestral texture (…)
That Zimmermann embraced this fact was one of the main reasons why this performance was so successful. Sitting on a chair unostentatiously when she wasn't playing and coming to the front of the stage when she was playing a prominent solo, Zimmermann seemed at ease with the unusual demands of the work. Her secure intonation, beautiful deep tone and nice long bows helped to make this a near-ideal rendition…
THE GUARDIAN, 12/17/2007, Andrew Clements:
…His [Colin Davis] account of the dramatic symphony Harold in Italy, with the solo viola played by the lustrous-toned Tabea Zimmermann, was drawn in bold, clear outlines (…) Zimmermann is the kind of self-reliant soloist Davis can rely on to make their contributions count with the minimum of fuss while he shapes the bigger details. Whether taking the spotlight in the first movement, adding her discursive commentary to the Pilgrims' March in the second, or making the briefest of appearances before the final Brigands' Orgy reaches its climax, she judged it all perfectly…
THE INDEPENDENT, Extra, 12/17/2007, Edward Seckerson:
…An equally beautiful but on this occasion more seductive voice - that of Tabea Immermann's viola - has come to inhabit the Bryonic world of Berlioz's Harold in Italy so completely that it is hard now to imagine anyone else playing the piece. From the moment her big mahogany sound stepped across the craggy threshold of the opening mountainscape it was clear that this Childe Harold had already found himself. How well she knows her place in the great scheme of this piece. Her hazy arpeggiations in the second movement's “March of pilgrims”, so relaxed in its balmy Italianate manner as to be almost horizontal , were perfection, while the Abruzzian serenade of the third brought out her chamber-music skills in alliance with some of Berlioz's most creative woodwind writing…
THE HERALD, 1/9/05:
"But the prize went to Tabea Zimmermann, whose heart-wrenching ending of Schumann's Märchenbilder was blessed with probably the best viola playing in the world."