Ravinia 2026 Issue 1

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 Kus- chnir, a famed Russian-born violinist and teacher whose past students include notables like Nikolaj 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 since, including being chosen as Gram- ophone magazine’s Young Artist of the Year in 2025. Dueñas has played Beethoven’s Vio- lin 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. The violinist’s first attempt at com- position came when she wrote cadenzas for Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 1, and 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 the cadenzas for Beethoven’s concerto. “Writing my own cadenzas helped me gain a very 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 . “And, 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 in the YouTube video. “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 concer- to 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 in the base- ment of the Musikverein, 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.” Kyle MacMillan served as classical music critic for the Denver Post from 2000 through 2011. He currently freelances in Chicago, writing for such publications as the Chicago Sun-Times , Early Music America , Opera News , and Classical Voice of North America . RAVINIAMAGAZINE • JULY 11 – JULY 19 , 2026 10 SONJAMUELLER