Maria Duenas - Beethoven And Beyond

Maria Duenas, Wiener Symphoniker, Manfred Honeck

On her debut album, Spanish violinist María Dueñas presents one of the most musically demanding and profound works in the repertoire - Beethoven's Violin Concerto. "You can't show virtuosity in Beethoven's concerto, you can only show yourself," says María Dueñas. "And the only way to do that is through sound." Recorded in acclaimed performances with the Vienna Symphony and Manfred Honeck at the Vienna Musikverein, it opens her debut album Beethoven and Beyond. With her own newly written cadenzas for each movement, the recording thereby presents María Dueñas not only as a performer but also as a composer. "Like a breath of fresh air," wrote a critic for the Spanish music journal Codalario after experiencing María Dueñas's cadenza in one of the performances at the Vienna Musikverein earlier this year, "revealed was her glorious sound, with double and triple stops, magnificent trills, and for all its modernity, full of respect for the essence of Beethoven's music." Fascinated by the process of composing, Dueñas did not stop at writing and recording cadenzas for all three movements herself; she also recorded the cadenzas for the first movement from five other artists. Very different approaches to the concerto by composers of different epochs and origins become clear: Mozartian-inspired, for example, as with Spohr, a contemporary of Beethoven, or virtuosic, as in the cadenza by the famous master Kreisler, of technical sophistication, as with Wieniawski and Ysaÿe, or romantic, as with Saint-Saëns. But that's not all, María Dueñas plays another work for violin and orchestra by each of the five. There are popular pieces among them - Kreisler's Liebesleid, Saint-Saëns' Havanaise and Wieniawski's Légende - and less familiar ones - the Adagio from Spohr's Symphonie concertante No. 1 and Ysaÿe's Berceuse. María Dueñas, who has been studying in Vienna for several years with renowned professor Boris Kuschnir, won first prize in the September 2021 Viktor Tretyakov International Violin Competition with her reading of Beethoven's Violin Concerto. "Beethoven's violin concerto has accompanied me in the most important moments of my life," says María Dueñas. "The move from Germany to Vienna on the recommendation of my mentor Maestro Vladimir Spivakov, my education and now the recording - Beethoven has always played a role." She is particularly pleased that she was able to record the work with Manfred Honeck, another of her mentors. "The Granada native's blend of verve and sensitivity was as enchanting as the focused, luminous tone of her violin." (Der Standard, on Dueñas's Beethoven performance at the Musikverein in January 2023)

Price: $35.98