Violinist María Dueñas imparts dynamic nuance to Beethoven and beyond

Virtuoso María Dueñas appears destined for a consequential, enduring performing career. The 24-year-old Spanish violinist has already checked many of the boxes that signal a young artist on an extraordinary rise, including a contract with Deutsche Grammophon, a first-place win at the Menuhin Competition and a solo recital at New York’s Carnegie Hall two years ago.

“Dueñas, who, in an industry always eager for the next prodigy, has emerged as something particularly special: a strong-willed young artist with something to say, and the skill to say it brilliantly,” wrote music critic Joshua Barone in 2024 in the kind of extended New York Times profile that most artists can only dream of receiving.

Giving her a big boost was her 2023 debut album on DG, “Beethoven and Beyond,” on which she presented more than simply another take on the composer’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61, to join the dozens upon dozen of recordings that exist. Instead — as a key part of the “beyond” — she featured her own cadenzas, showing off her composing talents and putting a more personal stamp on the work than would have been possible otherwise.

“When the composer gives you the opportunity to write your own cadenzas for their great concertos, then you should take it,” Dueñas said in a 2023 interview in Strings magazine. “The first time I played the Beethoven concerto, I wrote my own cadenzas. I have written cadenzas for all the concertos that provide the opportunity. I began with the Mozart concertos, then Beethoven, then Brahms.”

It will be in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto — with these cadenzas— that Dueñas will make her July 19 debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and at the Ravinia Festival. She will be joined by Chief Conductor Marin Alsop, who also will lead the composer’s Symphony No. 6 (Pastoral) in F Major, Op. 68, on the first half of the program.

A cadenza — improvised or, more often today, written out — is generally an extended solo in a concerto that allows the soloist show off virtuosity or expressiveness in a freer way. In many cases, composers supply their own cadenzas for their works. Beethoven wrote down the cadenzas for his piano concertos two years after he retired from performing in 1807, and it is believed that they offer what one scholar called a “retrospective distillation” of his past extemporized performances.

Indeed, this is probably the reason he didn’t supply cadenzas for his violin concerto — he didn’t play the violin and would not have had any improvised cadenza performances of his own to draw on. But he did provide cadenzas for a version of the concerto for piano and orchestra (published as Op. 61a) that he created subsequently at the request of Muzio Clementi. The longest and best known of these cadenzas is one that he wrote for the first movement, which also includes the timpani. A few violinists, including Christian Tetzlaff, have in turn arranged these cadenzas for the violin.

In addition to performing the Violin Concerto and her own cadenzas as part of her album “Beethoven and Beyond,” Dueñas paid homage to some earlier cadenza composers. She recorded ones written for the first movement by Kreisler, Saint-Saëns, Louis Spohr (a Beethoven contemporary), Henryk Wieniawski and Ysaÿe, as well as well-known and not so well-known showpieces for violin and orchestra by those same figures.

Dueñas is not the first soloist to release an album with multiple versions of cadenzas for a Beethoven concerto. In 2014, Jerome Lowenthal, a well-respected soloist and former chair of the piano department at the Juilliard School, released a two-disc album in which he recorded the composer’s famed Piano Concerto No. 4, along with 20 cadenzas written for the work by 11 composers, including Anton Rubinstein, Frederic Rzewski, Clara Schumann, and Ernő Dohnányi. But Duenas’ release is likely the first to take such an approach with the Violin Concerto, earning her the Opus Klassik Award (Germany’s most important classical music prize) for Young Artist of the Year in 2024.

The native of Granada, Spain, began lessons on the violin at age 7, and, four years later, won a scholarship from Juventudes Musicales de Madrid that allowed her to attend the Carl Maria von Weber College of Music in Dresden. Her whole family went with her. “We are three kids, and my parents,” Dueñas told the New York Times. “So, it was such a big risk for everyone. What if I said I didn’t want to play violin anymore after a year?” Less than two years later, the family uprooted again to Vienna, when Dueñas began studies with Boris Kuschnir, a famed Russian-born violinist and teacher whose past students include notables like Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider.

Early boosts to her career came quickly. She won the Zhuhai Violin Competition in China in 2017, the first of several such victories that resulted in performance videos that gained her a following on social media. In September 2019, Musical America named her its New Artist of the Month, and she was a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist in 2021 to 2023, which gained her studio recordings and concerts with BBC orchestras and valuable international exposure. The honors have kept coming, including being chosen as Gramophone magazine’s Young Artist of the Year in 2025.

Dueñas has played Beethoven’s Violin Concerto since she was a child, first taking it on just for fun. “I didn’t start working seriously on it until I was living in Germany,” she said in the Strings magazine interview. “When I played it for Marek Janowski [chief conductor of the Dresden Philharmonic] and asked when I could play it with his orchestra, he told me, ‘When you’re 18.’ I was 11 at that time. So that became a goal, to play Beethoven at a high enough level to perform it with him.” She went on to secure first prize at the Viktor Tretyakov International Violin Competition in September 2021 with her interpretation of the work in the finals.

Her first attempt at composition came when she wrote cadenzas for Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 1; then she did the same for his other concertos for the instrument. When she was 13, she wrote a solo piano piece titled Farewell. So, she had already experience in this realm when she took on Beethoven’s concerto. “Writing my own cadenzas helped me gain a deep insight into the structure of the piece, and my goal was, of course, to preserve Beethoven’s essence,” Dueñas said in a YouTube video about “Beethoven and Beyond.” “Also, by performing the cadenzas of other composers, I could see that the understanding of the Violin Concerto evolves throughout the years.”

She recorded the piece live with her cadenzas during a during a group of three performances with the Vienna Symphony in the city’s famed music hall, the Musikverein, giving her chance to leave a permanent record of her take on the celebrated work. “I think Beethoven definitely gives room for interpretation in his Violin Concerto,” she said. “I have worked with the manuscript, and you can see that Beethoven wasn’t very fixed about his ideas. There are a lot of themes which are crossed out, and he kept evolving and developing new ideas, so that’s how I think the concerto should also be approached. I think every time you perform it, you can find new nuances, new dynamics, so that’s the way of keeping music alive.”

Joining her for the performance was conductor Manfred Honeck, who met Dueñas after one of his concerts. She wound up playing for him, and he was impressed enough to become one of her champions. “She has her own tone, her own language, and she never copies the great violinists,” he told the New York Times. “And yet I am convinced that she will be one of them, the Perlmans and Oistrakhs of the future.”

This is an excerpt of an article that appears in Ravinia magazine. Reprinted with permission.