Confident. Clearly. Convinced. Everything about the personality of the Spanish violinist María Dueñas (2002) fits the profile of a world star in the making. You can also say that she has already reached the top, because her concert schedule is full of famous concert halls and big names to play with. How do you make a career so fast that you emerge from seemingly nothing in a few years among the world’s stars? In a video call – she lives and studies in Vienna – Dueñas ponders the ingredients of her success. “There are many factors. It’s hard to pinpoint one thing.”
And so we start at the beginning. Dueñas grew up in a family that listened to a lot of classical music. “When I heard a violin, I knew: I want to be able to do this too.” The conviction was so great that Dueñas could enter the conservatory of Granada at the age of seven. At the age of eleven she received a scholarship to continue her studies in Dresden. The whole family moved with them, only to pack their bags again a few years later, to Vienna. “The support of my parents plays a big role in my success.”
As of about 2018, Dueñas is attracting international attention by winning almost every violin competition she enters. “I am very competitive. Competitions make you confident and strong. Technically, but also mentally.” It has earned her a beautiful trophy cabinet and a Stradivarius violin on loan: the ‘Camposelice’ from 1710.
Most important moment
The gloriously successful Menuhin Violin Competition in 2021 is perhaps the most important moment in her career so far. “Yes, that was very special. I watched that competition when I was little. Then you saw all those young violinists, still teenagers, and I thought ‘how can you be so good?’ And now I was standing there myself.” She won first prize and the public prize there, and was immediately able to sign with Deutsche Grammophon. “That was really a dream come true.”
Dueñas’ debut album was released a few months ago Beethoven and beyond; a live recording of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, one of the best known and most played violin concertos. Dueñas: „I like a challenge. With my debut I wanted to make a statement and show as many sides of myself as possible. In Beethoven’s Violin Concerto you must reveal yourself.” She did this in the three cadenzas, the passages in which the soloist is allowed to improvise. Beethoven himself left no instructions about how to fill this in; that is open to every violinist. But in practice only the greats of the earth – violinists such as Gidon Kremer or Anne-Sophie Mutter – invent their cadenzas themselves. The safe choice, especially for young violinists, is to fall back on previously played and written cadenzas by, for example, great nineteenth-century violinists such as Joseph Joachim or Fritz Kreisler. But ‘safe’ does not appear in María Dueñas’ dictionary.
“A few years ago I wrote a cadenza for the first time, then for a violin concerto by Mozart. I’ve come to love it. It gives you a lot of insight into a piece of music, because you have to analyze a composer’s structure and style very carefully before you can improvise something that fits it. I wanted to keep as much of Beethoven as possible, and still add something of myself.” Also for her new album Homages 1770 she composed herself.
Video: María Dueñas plays Beethoven’s ‘Violin Concerto’. One of her self-composed cadenzas starts after minute 21:43.
Concertgebouw Orchestra Young
Dueñas’ concert schedule for next season is bursting with major stages and conductors. On Wednesday she will play in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw with the Concertgebouworkest Young, an annual project orchestra of young talented European musicians who are accompanied for a week by musicians from the Concertgebouworkest. The concerts, this year in Amsterdam and Berlin, are led by Andrés Orozco-Estrada. “A highlight in my agenda! I already knew the Concertgebouworkest Young before I received the invitation. There are not many initiatives that introduce such young musicians to orchestra playing at such a high level. I think they learn a lot from it.”
Her lightning success gives her a busy schedule, but not a hair on her head that doubts a life for music. “I get so many chances now and I experience so much. And I keep discovering something new that makes me want to work even harder. Music has so much to offer people. I love it when I see myself hitting someone during a concert. That is the best thing about this profession.”
Also read a report about KCO Young: ‘A concert by 73 young talents from 27 countries’