María Dueñas is a 23-year-old Spanish violinist and this week she is releasing her third album. Her first album, released in 2023, featured Beethoven’s Violin Concerto – for which she not only wrote her own cadenzas, but included on the recording cadenzas composed by five other composers (Louis Spohr, Eugène Ysaÿe, Camille Saint-Saëns, Henryk Wieniawski, and Fritz Kreisler) as well as short pieces by each of them. Her second album, released in 2025, featured Paganini’s 24 Caprices as well as caprices by other composers inspired by Paganini, from the 19th century to the present day.
Her latest album is Homage to Heifetz, featuring works associated with the great 20th-century violinist Jascha Heifetz: Symphonie espagnole by Édouard Lalo (which Dueñas first played at age 11), the Violin Concerto by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (which Heifetz premiered in 1947), and four encore pieces – three by Claude Debussy and one by Manuel Ponce – that Heifetz frequently played in concert. Dueñas plays those encores on the same 1731 Stradivarius that Heifetz owned.
I had the great privilege of speaking with Ms. Dueñas. As you can hear, she is thoughtful and passionate, and clearly intent on putting her own unique stamp on what it means to be an international virtuoso – much as Heifetz did in the previous century.
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