María Dueñas

María Dueñas Fernández (born 4 December 2002), is a Spanish violinist and composer. In 2021 she won the first prize in the Yehudi Menuhin Competition, in the Senior Division. She is considered the Spanish violinist with the greatest international profile. In 2022, she signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon.

Early life and education María Dueñas Fernández was born in 2002 in Granada, Spain, in a family in which there are no professional musicians, but who encouraged her musical training, as she attended concerts from an early age.

She started playing violin at age seven and enrolled at the Ángel Barrios Conservatory in her native Granada a year later. At the age of 11, she won a scholarship from the Juventudes Musicales de Madrid, allowing her to study at the Carl Maria von Weber College of Music in Dresden. On the recommendation of violinist and conductor Vladimir Spivakov, she then moved to Vienna to study with Boris Kuschnir, and enrolled at the University of Music and Dramatic Art in Vienna and at the University of Graz.

María has two sisters who are also musicians. Her sister Julia Dueñas plays violin and her sister Daniela Dueñas plays cello.

Musical career Dueñas has been a soloist with European and American orchestras, such as the San Francisco Symphony, the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Spanish National Orchestra. In September 2019, Dueñas was designated as the New Artist of the Month by the magazine Musical America, which is the oldest American magazine on classical music. Dueñas is also the founder of the Hamamelis Quartet.

She won the 1st prize at the 2021 Getting to Carnegie Hall competition, for which each participant performed the world premiere of one movement of Julian Gargiulo’s new sonata for violin and piano. In 2021, at the age of 18, Dueñas won the 1st prize and the Audience Prize in the Senior Division at the Menuhin Competition. For the final round of the competition, Dueñas played Lutosławski's Subito, Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 4 in D Major, and Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole in D minor. The award includes $20,000 and a 2-year loan of a golden period Stradivarius violin. In 2023 she won the Luitpold Prize of the festival Kissinger Sommer.

Other competitions she has competed in include the 1st Leonid Kogan International Competition for Young Violinists (1st Prize, 3rd Category) and the 2nd Zhuhai International Mozart Competition for Young Musicians (1st Prize, Violin Group B) in 2017, the 4th Yankelevitch International Violin Competition (1st Prize, Senior Division) and the 2nd Vladimir Spivakov International Violin Competition (1st Prize) in 2018, the Montreal International Musical Competition Violin Edition in 2019, and the 2nd Viktor Tretyakov International Violin Competition (Grand Prize) in 2021.

Instruments

As a stipendiary of the Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben, María Dueñas plays a Nicolò Gagliano violin (17?4 uncertain date) and the Stradivarius "Camposelice" (1710), on loan from the Nippon Music Foundation since 2022. From 2019 to 2022, María played the Guarneri del Gesù "Muntz" (1736), also on loan from the same foundation.

Influences Dueñas grew up around classical music influenced by recordings of violinists such as Yehudi Menuhin, David Oistrakh, and Jascha Heifetz. Her fascination with their distinctive sounds inspires her to work on her own. In an interview with Katherine Cooper from Presto Music in Dueñas' home in Vienna, she states about her influences:

Composing career Dueñas first developed an interest in composing when she composed her own cadenza for Mozart Concerto No. 1. She also proceeded to write cadenzas for Mozart's other concertos as well.

Dueñas plays the piano on occasion and through this developed an interest in experimenting with different harmonies. This eventually resulted in her composing the piece “Farewell” when she was 13, which was awarded the Robert Schumann International Piano Competition award in 2016. In 2020 with production by Alexander Houben and performance from pianist Evgeny Sinaiski, her piece later premiered as a music video.

She has made arrangements of string trios that she plays with her sisters, stating in an interview with Laurie Niles, founder and editor of violinist.com:

Discography

Albums Versions of Beethoven's Violin Concerto from Beethoven and Beyond were released as an additional 5 albums from May through July 2023 with each of them having First Movement Cadenzas written by Louis Spohr (12 May 2023), Eugène Ysaÿe (2 June 2023), Camille Saint-Saëns (16 June 2023), Henryk Wieniawski (30 June 2023), and Fritz Kreisler (14 July 2023). The Second and Third Movement Cadenzas are written by María in these 5 albums.

Singles and EPs