Interview, María Dueñas on Beethoven and Beyond

The 20-year-old Spanish violinist María Dueñas's debut recording of the Beethoven violin concerto (plus shorter pieces by Saint-Saëns, Spohr, Kreisler, Ysaÿe and Wieniawski) is proving to be our most popular title of the month by some margin, after featuring as Recording of the Week at the beginning of May. In between preparations for a tour of the US and a series of concerts at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, María spoke to me from her home in Vienna about falling in love with the violin 'at first sight' at a very young age, why she was keen to 'bring something of herself' to this cornerstone of the repertoire by crafting her own cadenzas, and her hope that her individual sound might one day be as recognisable as that of her heroes Heifetz and Oistrakh...

You enrolled at the conservatoire in your hometown of Granada when you were just seven years old – did you have a strong sense of musical vocation from a very young age?

My parents aren’t musicians, but they really love music. We listened to a lot of recordings when I was growing up (mostly of violinists) and we also attended a lot of concerts in my hometown, but there was never any pressure for me to pursue it. It was simply a case of love at first sight: apparently the first time I saw a violin on stage I just told them ‘That’s what I want to do!’. Perhaps it was something to do with the roundness of the sound, but it’s hard to pin down exactly why I felt that instant attraction – things are so natural and intuitive when you’re a child!

Who were your main sources of inspiration in those early days, and who are your mentors today?

Hearing recordings of Heifetz and Oistrakh when I was very young had a profound impact on me, because I could recognise the sound of those people instantly. Nowadays a lot of the time when you listen to recordings you can’t tell who’s playing - but when you hear Oistrakh you know who it is right away, and that’s something I would love to achieve myself. I spend a lot of time working on finding my own distinctive sound, and I dream of people playing a recording in the years to come and thinking ‘Ah, that’s María Dueñas!’.
So many conductors have supported me in my journey so far, including Manfred Honeck who believed in me right when I moved to Vienna. My teacher Boris Kuschnir has also been a great inspiration, both in terms of working on that individual sound and also understanding that specifically Austrian style and tradition. But I always say that every musician I work with gives me something: I like to learn from everyone!

Speaking of Austrian style and tradition, how was the experience of working with the Wiener Symphoniker on this recording?

It was the first time I’d performed with them, but I’m so immersed in Austrian culture these days and playing Beethoven with an Austrian orchestra felt so right. I’ve been living in Vienna for six years – I’m still at university here, and it’s very much my base now.
Every time I play with any orchestra it’s so inspiring, because new ideas always come up when you have that many musicians on the stage: I don’t think I’ve ever played a concerto the same way twice! It’s an interesting collaborative process, finding common ideas on the same piece. The connection with the audience is also very important to me, and I’m so glad that we were able to record the concerto live: when you’re on stage in a packed concert-hall there’s this possibility of conversation that you can’t really replicate in a studio, and I hope that comes across on the recording!

When did the Beethoven concerto come into your life?

I started playing it for fun when I was very young – it was important to have it in my fingers, as I knew I would have to work on it very seriously in the future. I started that serious work when I was about sixteen, and since then it’s played a very important role in my career. The concerto was one of the first ones I played after the pandemic and when I performed it in Dresden someone from Deutsche Grammophon came along to the concert and said that they wanted to work with me, so it’s really been a special priority in my life.

You’ve written your own cadenzas for the concerto – what’s your working process for that, and how long has composition been an interest of yours?

It actually all started with cadenzas: I wrote my first one for the Mozart Concerto No. 1 (which was the first Mozart concerto I ever performed), and after that I wrote cadenzas for the other Mozart concertos and mostly recently for the Beethoven and Brahms. It was just a way of giving something of myself to the music: I think if a composer offers you such an opportunity you should take it! I’ve since written some other things including a piece for piano, so it was all very natural.
It’s a very deep analytic process – first I have to look closely at the piece and its structure and identify which themes are most important for Beethoven, and on that basis I try to combine the things that are also more important for me. I’ll maybe play around with the key and tonality a little, but I always try to stay very true to Beethoven’s own essence. I’ve actually written more than one cadenza for the same concerto, because I think pieces keep evolving as you play them: every time I perform a concerto I have new ideas, so I change things and try to keep the music alive.
Does the instrument you play on the recording have special qualities which lend themselves well to Beethoven?

I actually recorded the album on two separate violins; they’re very different instruments in terms of the sound and the colours, and I like to match the instrument to the repertoire whenever I can. The Beethoven I did on the Gagliano violin which I’ve been playing for nearly ten years now. It’s an instrument I know very well and it’s also the violin I really developed my sound with, so it feels very close to me; I’ve played the Beethoven on it so many times, so it was the perfect combination. But I chose to play the Stradivarius [the 1710 ‘Camposelice’ violin, which has been on loan to Dueñas thanks to the Nippon Music Foundation since December] for some of the shorter, more Romantic pieces on the album because I just felt the sound suited them better.

Tell me a little about how you selected those shorter pieces…

For my first album I wanted to show as many different faces of me as possible, and also to explore different aspects of the violin: I think it’s a very rounded recording which covers so many periods, and also showcases everything that the violin has to offer. On the face of it, we have a very traditional concerto in the Beethoven and some very well-known pieces like the Kreisler, but there’s also something of myself with the cadenzas – and some of the other cadenzas and shorter pieces are hidden jewels that have barely been heard before.
The Spohr and Ysaÿe pieces, for instance, were completely new to me. I knew that I wanted to include not just other cadenzas but also pieces by the composers who wrote them; my research led me to these two, and as soon as I played through them I thought ‘This is music that people should know!’. As a young artist I feel responsible for presenting unfamiliar repertoire to audiences, and I just love discovering new things.

One upcoming project I’m especially excited about is some concerts in November with the Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, where we’ll be performing the Halvorsen concerto - a piece which I think has been recorded just a couple of times before…