“With her gorgeous sound – dense, warm and brilliant – and her immaculate technique, Dueñas is already at the top. She sculpted every musical sentence, continually shaping a myriad of nuances and effortlessly transitioning from bravura moments to whispers.”
Bachtrack, reviewing Dueñas’s performance of the Franck Violin Sonata at her Carnegie Hall recital debut, October 2024
Spanish violinist María Dueñas beguiles audiences with the breathtaking array of colours she draws from her instrument. Her technical prowess, artistic maturity and bold interpretations have inspired rave reviews, captivated competition juries, and secured invitations to appear with many of the world’s leading orchestras and conductors. A dedicated chamber musician, she has also performed with baritone Matthias Goerne, pianist Itamar Golan and guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre, among others. She has been studying with the world-renowned Professor Boris Kuschnir at the Music and Arts University of Vienna for several years.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has hailed the “freedom and joyous individuality” of Dueñas’s playing, while The Strad described her rising-star status as “seemingly unstoppable” after she won a whole series of international violin competitions. Not least among these was her livestreamed run to victory at the 2021 Menuhin Violin Competition, at which she won not only the first prize and audience prize, but also a global online following.
María signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon in September 2022 and opened her DG discography with the Beethoven Violin Concerto, for which she composed her own cadenzas. Entitled Beethoven and Beyond, her debut album also included five showpieces for violin and orchestra by Kreisler, Saint-Saëns, Spohr, Wieniawski and Ysaÿe, and a companion disc presenting cadenzas written by these same composers for the first movement of the Beethoven.
Recorded live at the Vienna Musikverein with the Wiener Symphoniker and Manfred Honeck, Beethoven and Beyond was released to widespread acclaim in May 2023 (“What a player, and what a way to launch a recording career” – Gramophone). The album won Dueñas a 2024 OPUS KLASSIK Young Talent of the Year award. She performed live at the gala awards ceremony, playing Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 1 with fellow DG artist Bruce Liu, and was also presented with the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag’s readers’ prize for Newcomer of the Year.
Her second album sees her tackle an icon of the repertoire: Paganini’s 24 Caprices. She couples these with a selection of Paganini-inspired works by composers ranging from Berlioz to Gabriela Ortiz. Dueñas is joined in chamber pieces by Boris Kuschnir, Itamar Golan, Alexander Malofeev and Raphaël Feuillâtre, and in orchestral caprices by the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin conducted by Mihhail Gerts. The album will be released in all formats on 14 February 2025.
Recent and forthcoming highlights include her world premiere performance of Gabriela Ortiz’s De Cuerda y Madera at the :alpenarte Festival in Schwarzenberg; her solo recital debut at New York’s Carnegie Hall; and an Austrian/German tour with the Wiener Symphoniker (Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 and the Beethoven Concerto). In early 2025 she performs the Korngold Violin Concerto with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Marin Alsop in Las Palmas, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Madrid and Barcelona (January) and with the Staatskapelle Berlin and Paavo Järvi in Berlin (February); Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole with The Cleveland Orchestra and Stéphane Denève in Florida (January/February), with further dates in Turin, Budapest and Pécs in the spring (April); and Saint-Saëns’s Third Violin Concerto in Pittsburgh with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and Manfred Honeck (February) and with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León and Vasily Petrenko in Valladolid (April).
Born in Granada in 2002, María Dueñas fell in love with classical music via the recordings her parents played constantly at home and the concerts she attended in her native city. She started playing violin at six and enrolled at Granada’s Conservatory a year later. In 2014 she was awarded a scholarship to study abroad by Juventudes Musicales Madrid and moved to Dresden to study at the Carl Maria von Weber College of Music. There she was soon spotted by violinist Wolfgang Hentrich and conductor Marek Janowsky, at whose invitation she would later make her debut as soloist with the San Francisco Symphony. In 2016, she and her family moved again, this time to Austria, on the recommendation of her mentor Vladimir Spivakov, to enable her to study at the Music and Arts University of Vienna and the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz.
A multi-faceted musician, Dueñas developed a love of composing after she started writing cadenzas for Mozart’s violin concertos. A solo piano piece, Farewell, was awarded a prize in the 2016 “Von fremden Ländern und Menschen” Competition for Young Composers. Recorded by Evgeny Sinaiski, it was transformed into a music video filmed during the pandemic.
Her performance competition victories began with the 2017 Zhuhai International Mozart Competition and 2018 Vladimir Spivakov International Violin Competition. In addition to her success in the Menuhin Competition, 2021 saw her win first prize at the Getting to Carnegie Competition, the Grand Prize at the Viktor Tretyakov International Violin Competition, and the career advancement prize at the Rheingau Music Festival. She was also named as a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist 2021–23.
María Dueñas plays the Nicolò Gagliano violin of 17?4, kindly loaned by the Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben, and the Stradivarius “Camposelice” of 1710, on generous loan from the Nippon Music Foundation.
11/2024