Ravinia 2026 Issue 1

Camille Saint-Saëns, and Eugène Ysaÿe. At the urging of violinist Anne Aki- ko Myers, John Corigliano added his versions to the collection in . e celebrated composer—who wrote the score for the lm e Red Violin and adapted a concerto six years later from that music—was a natural choice for the project, because his father was concertmaster of the New York Philhar- monic for more than two decades and was o en a soloist in the work. “I see them becoming the gold standard,” Myers wrote in an essay for Strings magazine, “as they are powerful and virtuosic, with Red Violin overtones in them. John studied the piano version that Beethoven composed, and was inspired by the timpani included in the rst movement. Playing these cadenzas feels like looking through a Beethoven prism, with colors and themes sliding around and glistening in some alternate dimension. ey are respectful of Bee- thoven from an authentically contempo- rary viewpoint.” IN ADDITION to performing the Violin Concerto and her own cadenzas as part of her album Beethoven and Beyond , Dueñas paid homage to some of the earlier composers of cadenzas. She recorded ones written for the rst movement by Kreisler, Saint-Saëns, Lou- is 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 gures. Dueñas is not the rst soloist to release an album with multiple versions of cadenzas surrounding a Beethoven concerto. In , Jerome Lowenthal, a well-respected soloist and former chair of the piano department at e Juil- liard School, released a two-disc album in which he recorded the composer’s famed Piano Concerto No. along with cadenzas written for the work by composers, including Anton Rubinstein, Frederic Rzewski, Clara Schumann, and Ernő Dohnányi. But her release is likely the rst to take such an approach with RAVINIA.ORG • RAVINIAMAGAZINE 9