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Maria Dueñas
By: Paul Seydor

June 24th, 2025

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A SUPERSTAR IS BORN

On her first two albums Maria Dueñas tackles Beethoven, Paganini, and more

In 2023 Deutsche Grammophon launched its “Original Source Series” (OSS) of critically acclaimed recordings from the 1970s, cut for the first time directly from the 4- or 8-track original masters and remastered for exclusive release on vinyl only. The series, continuingly covered with great authority by my Tracking Angle colleagues Mark Ward and Michael Johnson, is so successful it has obscured the fact that for the past several years DG have also been routinely issuing simultaneous digital and vinyl versions of many of their brand-new releases, particularly of their headline artists: Yuja Wang, Hillary Hahn, Alice Sara Ott, Lang Lang, Víkingur Ólafsson, Daniel Trifonov, and the label’s latest sensation Maria Dueñas, not to mention reissues of albums not so recent, e.g., Festival, Gustavo Dudamel’s celebrated 2008 collection of orchestral pieces by composers south of the border, and Credo, from 2004, Hélène Grimaud's first Concept album. Of course, these are all digitally recorded, but so what?—everyone reading Tracking Angle knows digital sources often benefit from vinyl presentation. And like the OSS series, these LPs are limited in number and tend to sell out rather quickly, so if you’re tempted—well, forewarned as they say . . . . 

Beethoven and Beyond

Produced by: Rainer Maillard and Lukas Kowalski

Engineered by: Juan Mareno and Lukas Kowalski

Mixed by: Rainer Maillard and Lukas Kowalski

Mastered at: Emil Berliner Studios

Lacquers cut by: Sidney C. Meyer at Emil Berliner Studios

(available on CD, 180g vinyl and streaming)

Music

Sound

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Born in 2002 in Granada, Spain, Maria Dueñas began playing violin at the age of six, enrolling at the Ángel Barrios Conservatory in Granada; five years later she won a scholarship to the Carl Maria von Weber College of Music, one of Germany’s oldest conservatories; at fourteen she was in Austria being mentored by the distinguished Boris Kuschnir at the Music and Arts University of Vienna and the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz. She has placed first in some eight international competitions, including the prestigious Menuhin; by the time she was twenty, Deutsche Grammophon wasted no time signing her up, her maiden outing in what is still for me the most beautiful, also the greatest, of all concertos for the instrument, Beethoven’s, which she recorded, before turning twenty-one, with Manfred Honeck conducting the Vienna Symphony.

Her youth notwithstanding, the Beethoven has loomed large in her life from an early age. She started learning it “just for fun”; by the time she moved to Germany she had practiced it enough to play it for the conductor Marek Janowski, who told her that when she was eighteen he would conduct her with orchestra under his baton. “I was eleven at that time. So that became a goal, to play Beethoven at a high enough level to perform it with him.” A few years later, she was invited to audition for Herbert Blomstdet. “I played the concerto without accompaniment, not even a piano, because our meeting was unexpected and happened at the last minute. I just went onstage in the empty hall and played Beethoven for him.” (Right away he invited her to play the Mendelssohn concerto with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.) Meanwhile, the Beethoven was the last concerto she performed in concert before the pandemic and the first she performed after it, in 2021, under Janowski with the Dresden Philharmonic (three nights in a row).

Beethoven, age 34, circa 1806, when he wrote the Violin Concerto

I recount this brief history to make the point that this debut recording isn’t a matter of a major label exploiting a young artist by pushing her into sure-fire repertoire whether she’s ready for it or not. Indeed, when DG signed her they requested this concerto precisely because of her long history with it. She has really earned this recording. And she’s certainly got everything it takes to be both a superstar and a musician of the first order: imagination, intelligence, flawless technique, interpretive insight beyond her years, a temperament fiery and passionate yet graceful and lyrical, and a view of the work that is at once thoughtfully personal and highly individual without being in the least idiosyncratic or courting difference for difference’s sake. With a first movement five seconds short of 28 minutes (21-25 the norm) and a last movement that exceeds twelve (ten or fewer the norm), her interpretation is broad but never feels slow in the sense of plodding, heavy, or merely portentous, despite some very expansive phrasing and rubato, notably in the first movement, particularly in her trills, which she draws out to considerable length. Yet everything grows, flows, and surges in its own time, phrased with great sensitivity and beautifully inflected, by turns songful, even rhapsodic (her first and second entrances, the whole of the slow movement) and lyrical, her tone rich, glowing, full of color with absolutely no fear of vibrato, liberally yet always tastefully applied. (Her instrument is a Stradivarius "Composelice" of 1710.)

It’s an unapologetically romantic view of the work, generous of feeling, often large of gesture, and hardly without risk in these days of Historically Informed Performance (HIP) practice that insists on fast tempos, lean sonorities, and near chamber-sized orchestras. The Larghetto is rendered with great depth of feeling, ruminative in places, in others with a hushed intensity that makes me hold my breath. Beethoven didn’t supply a cadenza for the slow movement, but Dueñas adds one of her own, where to bewitching effect she subtly adumbrates the main theme of the third movement. The Rondo isn’t as bouncy and energetic as several other recordings in my collection, but it is marvelously festive in a way that makes it a natural and logical conclusion to the conception as a whole.

An early mentor of hers, a string player himself (violin and viola), and on the cusp of completing his own critically acclaimed Beethoven symphony cycle with the Pittsburgh Symphony (for Reference Recordings, the first from an audiophile label), Manfred Honeck not only is Dueñas’s full partner in this enterprise but is wholly supportive of and committed to her conception of the piece. In Pittsburgh (where he is the music director), he plays the symphonies with greater contrapuntal clarity, whereas in Vienna he coaxes a richer, more blended orchestral palate of a kind that sometimes invites metaphors like “well upholstered,” at once glowingly sonorous yet sculpted (I wouldn’t call it Brahmsian, though it certainly glances in that direction).

Like a number of younger performers these days, Dueñas is enamored of “Concept” albums, in which a number of different works and/or composers are brought under the same conceptual umbrella by way of contextualizing one another. Hence the Beethoven and Beyond title, “beyond” concerning the first-movement cadenzas. A composer herself, she has also supplied her own for the first and last movements (I like them all, especially how in the first one she always keeps a sense of the violin’s main melody before us even when she isn’t playing it literally—very Beethoven that). But she also plays first movement cadenzas by Spohr, Ysaÿe, Saint-Saëns, Wieniawski, and Kreisler, then programs a short work for violin and orchestra by each of them.

These shorter works are all new to me, so I can’t comment on them with any experience, except to say that I enjoyed them, especially Saint-Saëns’s Havanaise, a characteristic piece based on Cuban Habanera dance rhythms; Wieniawski’s Légende, a touching work the composer wrote in order to prove to the parents of a young woman that he was fit to marry her (it worked); and Kreisler’s Liebesleid, full of heartfelt Viennese sentiment, with which Dueñas identifies as if to the period born (I have a personal connection with this piece, as a recording of the version for violin and piano, Kreisler accompanied by Rachmaninoff, is featured in a scene in Ron Shelton’s movie Cobb, which I edited).

The only curious thing is the layout of the CDs. CD 1 contains the complete concerto and all the occasional pieces,  CD 2 only the five additional cadenzas (around eighteen minutes total). Why didn’t DG engineers switch the cadenzas to CD 1, the occasional pieces to CD 2, and make it possible for home users to program each cadenza into the concerto itself? A missed opportunity.

The concerto was recorded live in the Golden Hall of the Vienna Musikverein, one of the most famous and acoustically beautiful of all the European concert halls. The sonics are appropriately golden, warm and inviting, with a wide dynamic range. My principal and practically only reservation is that the recording is just a tad close, with a corresponding flatness of perspective, the soundstage commendably wide but without appearing to extend very far back and without much space between the soloist and the orchestra (the violin sometimes spreads across the soundstage). One thing in particular I noticed is that the violin/orchestra relationship seems to me somewhat different in the last movement, more realistic with respect to balance, particularly in the interplay of the violin with the winds and horn, while in the closing tutti the orchestra overwhelms the violin, which is what usually happens in concert. Whether this owes to a different night with different miking—the performance is a composite from three nights—or manipulation at the controls, I cannot say.

Dueñas and Honneck performing the Beethoven Violin Concerto in the Golden Hall of the Vienna Musikverein, where the album was recorded live.

I personally prefer the compact disc and the vinyl to the streaming option because they feel more solid and substantial. However, as between them, it’s a tossup. The vinyl has slightly more saturated tonal colors and a plusher lower end of the spectrum; the compact disc a bit more clarity, focus, and definition. Regardless, overall this is still excellently engineered, tonally quite opulent, with that difficult to define but immediately audible impression of live-music vitality. So let none of these observations deter you from buying the set in the format you prefer. I’ve been listening to this concerto since I was a junior in college, have acquired several recordings along the way (and listened to countless more); yet having listened to it now four times all the way through, I can’t think of one that has given me greater pleasure, few as much.  

Paganini: 24 Caprices

Produced by: Alexander Grün

Engineered by: Alexander Grün

Mixed by: Alexander Grün

Mastered by:  Martin Kistner

Lacquers cut by: Sidney C. Meyer at Emil Berliner Studios

(available on CD, 180g vinyl and streaming)

Music

Sound

One of the joys I treasure most about reviewing for Tracking Angle and The Absolute Sound is the serendipitous discovery of either wholly new music or music that has been around for a long, long time but which I’ve never explored. Dueñas’s second album in her new contract with DG is one such: she tackles one of the Everests of the solo violin repertoire—by common consent the Everest when it comes to the techniques of playing the violin—Paganini’s 24 Caprices, the technical challenges of which are extreme, several of them requiring all but superhuman dexterity, flexibility, and strength in fingers, hands, and arms.

For decades following their publication, in 1820, several of them were considered impossible. It is said Paganini made some of them so difficult even he couldn’t play them, precisely to force himself to learn them so he could. Now, even the most difficult are practiced and played (or at least attempted) by all very good or better violinists, though fully mastering their most formidable technical hurdles, let alone mastering them in such a way as to make them at once seem effortless yet musically meaningful, remains an elusive goal that beckons many, chooses few.

Unfortunately, this has saddled them with a reputation that, though manifestly unfair, stubbornly persists in some quarters to this day: much technique, little music. I can’t recall if that is the reason I paid them little attention over five decades of classical music collecting and listening—the exception being, of course, the ubiquitous 24th, with its catchy opening tune that’s been appropriated by so many composers (most famously in variations by Brahms and Rachmaninoff). As for the rest, while I have many recordings of Bach’s unaccompanied violin sonatas and partitas, and a couple of Ysaÿe’s sonatas for solo violin, I have none of Paganini’s Caprices despite the availability of dozens of complete sets and hundreds of individual selections.

So when Dueñas’s arrived I figured I’d begin by sampling a few. After all, though Paganini published them all together as Opus 1, they were composed over the decade between 1807 and 1817, in groups of five, seven, and twelve (or six, six, and twelve). Neither before nor after publication did he ever perform them in public, and there is no hard evidence he played even a few of them in private gatherings for friends. It is conjectured he published them only so that other violinists would attempt them, come a cropper, and thus reconfirm his reputation as the greatest violinist the world had ever known. And so protective was he of his virtuosity that he refused to play the solo parts of his concertos in rehearsals with orchestras because he didn’t want his innovative techniques to be imitated.

Paganini generated such excitement with his virtuosity that members of the audience often fainted at his concerts.

In fact—a brief historical digression here— Niccolò Paganini was history’s first superstar, musical or otherwise, and he set the pattern for the lifestyle that continues to this day among rockstars, pop singers, and other celebrity entertainers: sybaritic behavior (much womanizing, addictions to alcohol and gambling), high fees (his tickets cost twice and more than those of any other virtuoso performer), extravagant showmanship (he would arrange for the strings on his violin to break one by one so he could finish on a single string, which usually brought the house down), carefully cultivated image (tall, thin, gaunt, pale of skin, he often dressed in black, which, in combination with his other behavior, did little to dispel, much to reinforce the widely held belief that he actually did enter into a Mephistophelian bargain to sell his soul in return for fame, fortune, and God-like artistry), and charisma that held audiences spellbound (after the triumphant Paris performance of his fourth violin concerto, the French critic Castil-Blaze reported that “several members of the audience fainted with excitement”). Lionized though he was throughout his life, including intense admiration not just for his playing but for his music by such luminaries as Rossini, Schubert, Berlioz, Schumann, Chopin, and Liszt (so awestruck by his playing that he was inspired to advance pianism to the equivalent level of virtuosity and expressiveness), when he died it was five years before the Catholic Church would allow him to be buried on consecrated ground owing to the legend of his bargain with the devil.

Tall, slim, gaunt, pale, attired in black, Paganini's carefully curated image encouraged the belief that he had sold his soul to the devil in return for God-like skill and artistry on the violin.

Whatever else, though, it’s doubtful Paganini ever intended or imagined all twenty-four caprices being played or listened to in a single sitting. So as I say, I sat down, late of a typically cool but sunny Southern California spring afternoon, and cued the first side. Before I knew it, over a hundred minutes had passed, the stylus was locked spinning in the lead-out groove, and I was glued to my listening chair, by turns enthralled, enchanted, entranced or delighted, thrilled, exhilarated, or—well, let's just say generally all around gobsmacked! I repeated this experience two more times in the coming weeks, each time more exhilarated, first by novelty, then by increasing familiarity. One of these was with a close friend, a fellow audiophile, a member of my informal listening group, who, like me, has listened to classical music his whole life yet never paid much attention to Paganini. He, too, was similarly gobsmacked and acquired the set right away.

We discovered what countless others before us already knew: Paganini may have composed these pieces as studies for himself and other violinists to develop and advance their skills, in the process extending the expressive and technical range of the violin beyond anything anyone imagined before him. But he called them, not etudes or preludes, rather “caprices,”  a musical form that goes as far back as the sixteenth century and refers to pieces that are typically free in form, mercurial in mood, unpredictable in temperament, often characteristic (i.e., evoking an individual or specific character, attitude, or mood), typically light and lively (though not always), and usually short (the shortest well under three minutes, the longest around eight).

What I was wholly unprepared for is how fantastic these pieces are, a descriptor I use in the sense of its original relationship to “fantasy”: evocative of dreams, of magic, of reverie and romance, and also of the phantasmagorical, the strange, the eccentric, occasionally even the weird, not to mention emotion, delight, humor, wit, whimsy, and playfulness. They’re also addictive. Since this set arrived over a month ago, I’ve taken as deep as dive as time would allow into this particular recording, other recordings (too many to count), Paganini himself, and violin playing. I do not play the violin, but I am fortunate in having a close friend and fellow audiophile in Peter Kent, one of Los Angeles’s top studio violinists (which automatically makes him one of the top studio violinists in the world). Peter joined me for several listening sessions during which he schooled me on the music and the playing in ways only a professional who practices daily, as he does, always including a few of the Caprices, could.

Bust of Niccolò Paganini made circa 1830-33, when he was around 50, by David d'Angers 

This is the point at which it is probably most prudent, not to mention honest for me to stop now, being still new to this music and still flush with wide-eyed discovery and, frankly, thoroughly besotted ga-ga amazement. That said, I beg indulgence for three observations, perhaps permissible because entirely subjective and indicative of early enthusiasm.

First, even if your experience of violin playing is fairly rudimentary, it’s perfectly obvious that the fiddling here is at a level of mastery that is rare indeed, even among stellar virtuosos. Examples abound in every one of them, but go to 5, with what Charlotte Gardner, whose eloquent rave in the April Gramophone first alerted me to this release, aptly calls the “blizzard of ricochets” in its middle section. Ricochet means bouncing the bow off the string, to which Paganini adds several crossings, which jack up the difficulty exponentially. Or the first, with its multiple stops and arpeggios (when I played this for my wife, she exclaimed, “How expressive her playing is!”). Or the last, where I gasped the first time I heard how powerful, even explosive are her left-hand pizzicatos in the ninth variation—which I mentioned to Peter, who said, “Yeah, they’re astounding!”

Second, take what I’m about to say next for what a tyro’s perspective may be worth, but in the comparisons I found I usually preferred the sound of her violin, a Nicolò Gagliano violin circa the 1770s, over what I hear in many others: tonally richer in the lower strings, with a lot of contribution from the body itself (a characteristic, according to Peter, of this violin maker), brilliant on the upper ones, from which Dueñas produces a kaleidoscopically dazzling range of color, sonority, touch, and dynamic shading, a variety directly mirrored in her gloriously variegated interpretive approaches to and characterizations of the individual numbers.

“In Spanish, caprichio means taking a liberty with something,” Dueñas says, “anything from food to music.” She is not only supremely attuned to how different the Caprices are from one to another, but is breathtakingly, fearlessly responsive to how quickly, often radically, occasionally violently mood, attitude, and temperament can turn on a dime within each piece. She revels in their constantly shifting landscapes. 19, for example: how sinuously she phrases the melody in the A section before aggressively launching into the B section where at 4:25 she makes you think you’ve wandered into Bartok territory with an ensemble of strings. Or 4, perhaps the most melancholy of the twenty-four, where she goes to the heart of what she perceives as “a sense of pain running through it.”

Classical and early romantic composers delighted in making solo instruments imitate other instruments, a delight Dueñas clearly shares, whether flutes and horns (9), trumpet (14), post horn (18), and, my personal favorite, a bagpipe in 20, where the D string produces the drone, while the A and E strings in imitation of chanters weave a lovely undulating melody, her performance so exquisite I think I played this one every time I listened to the set piecemeal.

And the forbidding 24th, surely the most tightly compressed and mercurial set of variations in the history of music? Paganini works his famous tune through eleven variations plus a finale all in the space of plus-four to plus-seven minutes, Dueñas at the outer end of the range. Peter and I listened to several performances one afternoon via Qobuz, after which I remarked that most of them seemed to me faster than Dueñas’s. He replied, “Yeah, well, there are a lot of violinists who try to set speed records with this music, which I don’t necessarily care for. What she is doing is much harder, because it involves a longer stroke, which requires more control. Her control is phenomenal!” To my ears she shapes these variations into a narrative, a kind of odyssey if you will—and no, I can’t translate what I mean by that into paraphrasable terms, only that it is how I hear it, how it feels to me. As it happens, well after I had formed this impression, I came across an interview where she calls it “a showcase for everything one can go through in a lifetime, showing just how much Paganini developed as a person over the four or five years it took him to reach this final caprice in the series.”

"Here, Paganini combines everything that we already had in the previous caprices: double stops, wild bowings, cantabile moments, sad moments, nostalgia and plenty of furious passages."

Third, by her own admission, Dueñas is very much aware that Paganini loved opera and that he lived in the time of bel canto. As in the Beethoven concerto, her cantabile playing, her legato feels less played than genuinely sung. Try 11, of which she says, “As a violinist, you need to be able to switch quickly from one character to the other, but also to sing every note, even in the fast and virtuosic passages. This is a challenge, yes, but a good one.”

Unlike her Beethoven debut, Dueñas spent a whole year in the studio making this album, yet it never feels calculated or self-conscious. Like the pieces themselves, she’s everywhere spontaneous, impetuous, unbridled, impulsive, sometimes even reckless yet without ever losing control. Even better, she often sounds like she’s having fun (try 13, "The Devil's Laughter," where she teases just a hint of sleaze out of the melody).

Like Beyond Beethoven, this too is a Concept album, in which Dueñas includes seven caprices by other composers who came after Paganini, continuing right up to the present. Sarasate’s Caprice Basque is for violin and piano (Itamar Golan, Dueñas’s longtime pianist collaborator); Cervello’s Milstein Caprice for solo violin was written especially for Dueñas because her playing reminded the composer of the great Nathan Milstein’s; on Wieniawski’s Etude-Caprice for two violins Dueñas is joined by her mentor Boris Kuschnir; Gabriella Ortiz, who wrote her violin concerto Altar de cuerdo for Dueñas in 2022, contributes De duerdo y madera for violin and piano (Alexander Nakifeev partnering), composed expressly for this album and Dueñas, here receiving its world premiere. Two capriccios by Saint-Saens and one by Berlioz, all for violin and orchestra, complete the program, Mihhail Gerts conducting the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. As with Paganini’s Caprices, these too are entirely new to me and I enjoyed them all.

Released on CD, streaming platforms, and vinyl, the superlative sonics are some of the most beautifully recorded violin sound I’ve ever heard, the relationship between proximity of microphones and room sound ideal. The violin is front and center, bold and immediate, and so colorful I played it louder than usual because the music and the playing are so involving I wanted to make the experience as immersive as I possibly could.

And, yes, though the margin is not huge, I have to say that I liked the vinyl best of all: more organic, more lifelike, with a greater sense of bloom, vitality, and reach-out-and-touch it tactility. And though the compact disc and streaming have plenty of warmth and dimensionality, the vinyl has a bit more, with, like the Beethoven, blissfully quiet surfaces. When asked about vinyl in a recent interview, Dueñas said, “I have a very large vinyl collection. I like listening to vinyl, especially!” The one oddity is that only the 24 Caprices are on vinyl; the rest of the pieces are on a compact disc included in one of the gatefold jacket’s sleeves. Presumably DG wanted to restrict this to a two-LP set for reasons of pricing. Don’t let that deter you, the digital sound is just fine and I would not feel in the least deprived if that’s all I had.

Nearly all the way through June as I prepare to post this review, Dueñas’s 24 Caprices is on every level the most exciting new album I’ve heard so far this year. And though I am wrapping up the review, I am far from finished with these spellbinding miniatures, which I shall go on exploring and enjoying as long as I listen to music. I could scarcely have imagined a more persuasive, compelling, and spectacular introduction than that provided by this prodigiously gifted young artist.

Listening and Watching


Here is a BBC interview where Dueñas identifies her seven favorite Paganini Caprices, with links to YouTube videos of her playing the 5th and the 24th, the latter in an excellent MTV-style promotional video DG created, in which thanks to the wizardry of moviemaking she manages the nifty trick of a wardrobe change in the instant it takes to cut from one shot to another!

Comments

  • 2025-06-25 02:50:51 AM

    Jennnifer Martin wrote:

    Thank you, Paul, for this excellent writing. I look forward to hearing these, especially the recording of my favorite violin concerto. I confess to having stayed away, with rare exception, from the non-OS recent DG releases due to the digits. I'll try to put that bias aside and listen as objectively as possible to what I'm sure are wonderful performances.

    Jenn

    • 2025-06-25 10:49:19 AM

      Paul Seydor wrote:

      Jenn, thank you for the kind words. I've been recommending both recordings to all and sundry and all reply with gratitude, so I hope your experience is similar. Even if it isn't I'd love to hear your thoughts. As the review makes clear, with the Paganini this is my first go 'round and it certainly won't be my last. As for the Beethoven, I must say I found next to nothing that is digitally objectionable about the sound. Inasmuch as this is your favorite concerto too, do not miss my other recent favorit: the wonderful Vilde Frang with Pekka Kuusisto conducting the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen on Warner. Excellent sound and a performance at the opposite end of the spectrum from Dueñas: very much HIP (though not with period instruments), very energetic with lean sonorities, chaste vibrato, and a chamber sized orchestra. Yet I love it as much as I do Dueñas, which is only to say that I marvel anew at Beethoven's genius that he could write a piece that could be heard in such divergent ways yet still be the piece he wrote. As Schnabel famously said, when it comes to great music no single performance can be greater than the music itself.

      • 2025-06-26 12:12:31 PM

        John Marks wrote:

        Hi, Just making sure that everyone knows that because Beethoven's violin concerto met with mixed reviews, his publisher asked him to... re-write it as a piano concerto. Yup. That piano concerto (I have never heard word of a live performance in my neck of the woods, meaning New England plus New York) is Beethoven's Opus 61a. Supposedly, Heifetz played piano well enough that he could have performed it. But I grew up in the Era of Apotheosizing Heifetz.

        • 2025-06-26 05:15:43 PM

          Paul Seydor wrote:

          John: I mistakenly placed this reply below. Here goes again: John, thanks so much for referencing Beethoven’s “sixth” piano concerto, arranged out of his “failed” violin concerto. Can we even begin to imagine how this glorious piece could have met with indifference, let alone neglect? What Beethoven said of his quartets evidently applied here too: “music for a later age.” I assume you know that when Beethoven made this arrangement he also wrote a cadenza for the first movement, a cadenza that brought in the tympani that opens the concerto. He never wrote a cadenza for the violin concerto, but once he made the piano arrangement, he arranged the piano cadenza for violin, complete with tympani addition. I’ve two recordings where violinists use the piano-to-violin cadenza: Wolfgang Schneiderhan with Jochum on DG and Christian Tetzlaff with Zinman on Arte Nova, both highly regarded and very good, Tetzlaff/Zinman really fast, lean, and mean with spanking clean clear recording, Schneiderhan/Jochum not slow but a bit closer to middle of the road. The cadenza is absolutely wild, almost like a miniature fantasia inside the larger movement.

          • 2025-06-26 05:16:43 PM

            Paul Seydor wrote:

            As for the piano version itself, I have Peter Serkin and Ozawa and Ronald Brautigam and Andrew Parrott, who are antithetical to each other: Serkin/O very very slow, Brautigam/P fast, ship shape, buttoned up, and loaded for HIP bear (on period instruments, including piano). The latter part of the cadenza goes so far afield—to my ears, anyhow—of the overall lyrical mood, tenor, and tone of the piece, especially in the piano version, that I can’t for the life of me understand what Beethoven was thinking. We can hardly blame him for wanting to give the concerto a new lease on life after its indifferent reception, but, fascinating as it to hear the piano version, the original will never be displaced. Thanks again, John, for sending me on this tangent. Love to hear your thoughts on the piano version once you’ve heard it.

  • 2025-06-25 03:34:20 AM

    Wishful Listener wrote:

    I was also wondering why these great albums have not been reviewed here, really enjoy the TA vinyl reviews.

    Got the 24 Caprices with Perlman, Accardo, Fischer, Ibragimova (in high res most of them), and Dueñas recording is my favorite, it's so vivid and impressive.

    • 2025-06-25 10:36:49 AM

      Paul Seydor wrote:

      Whishful, as I replied to Jenn, I am very eager to investigate other performers and recordings, so thank you for naming names. I have explored two of the ones you mention: Perlman, who on initial listening produces a beautiful sound--Peter Kent informs Perlman's Strad is widely regard as having the ideal "50/50" balance among brilliance and body--and characterizes the pieces. And the sound is excellent. I listened at length to Michael Rabin, to whom most violinists genuflect, and confess disappointment. First, because the EMI sound does his violin no favors. Second, his speeds! When I first listened to Dueñas I listened all the through. WIth Rabin, despite his technical brilliance, the speeds left me exhausted after half a dozen Caprices. I had a not dissimilar reaction to Ricci. On the other, Ibragimova is wonderful, in some respects the antithesis of Dueñas in taking a considerably darker more delicate view of many of the pieces: at one point in 24 Peter remarked that she pushed lotto vocce considerably farther than he'd ever heard it.

      • 2025-06-25 05:31:37 PM

        Ugur Parlak wrote:

        Not only she plays brilliantly but she also conveys a lyrical story. She is talented and these albums are must for vinyl enthusiasts! Thank you for the reviews.

      • 2025-06-27 04:57:49 PM

        Mark Ward wrote:

        I am a big fan of Ibragimova, owning many of her Hyperion releases. It will be fascinating to listen to this next to the Duenas.

        • 2025-06-27 05:21:43 PM

          Paul Seydor wrote:

          Ibragimova's is outstanding and so different from Duenas. Two divergent paths to the mountain top.

    • 2025-06-27 04:56:04 PM

      Mark Ward wrote:

      I wish we could get to more of the new classical coming out, especially when there is a vinyl edition. It's simply down to time constraints since we all have other things going on. I am especially thrilled that Paul focused on these releases (and more to come) and is thus widening our reviewing net. He has certainly persuaded me to investigate these albums.

      • 2025-06-29 05:57:20 PM

        Wishful Listener wrote:

        Last year Hyperion released the 2012 Ibragimova recording of Mendelssohn violin concertos and The Hebrides overture with Vladimir Jurowski. Later this year they will release the vinyl of her 2015 recording of Bach violin concertos. If we are lucky enough Hyperion continues with this trend, we may see a release of her 2021 Paganini's 24 Caprices in vinyl in the near future.

        • 2025-07-01 11:51:17 AM

          Paul Seydor wrote:

          The moment it appears I shall buy it!

        • 2025-07-01 11:51:21 AM

          Paul Seydor wrote:

          The moment it appears I shall buy it!

  • 2025-06-26 03:30:20 PM

    EAD wrote:

    Thanks, Paul, for this great informative article and great review!! Thanks for putting Maria Dueñas on my radar, so to speak.

    I have the 24 Caprices with Ithzak Perlman, and I have now ordered the Maria Dueñas. Judging from the youtube-videos you included in your article, I shall be enjoying her performance very much. On first impressions (from the youtube videos) I find her very lyrical. She goes beyond the technical challenges.

    Her Beethoven violin concerto will shortly follow. While I type this, I am listening to Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis with Otto Klemperer. Love it ;-)

    Best wishes! Eugene

    • 2025-06-26 04:01:53 PM

      Paul Seydor wrote:

      Thank you, Eugene. I can’t imagine you’ll be disappointed with the Caprices or the violin concerto. They’re both so beautiful and so completely personal and individual, the way she revels in the coloristic possibilities, and the technical challenges—well, as Charlotte Garnder put it in her Gramophone review (which I urge you to read), they are long since child’s play for her. Re: Klemperer Missa solemnis: around the time when I was in college and discovering the Beethoven violin concerto I also discovered the Missa in Klemperer’s stereo recording with the New Philharmonia Orchestra and chorus. I kid you not, I listened to this nearly every day the first six months I owned it. It is still for me one of the greatest pieces of music ever written—along with Beethoven’s op 131 and 111—and for the kind of reading he does—monumental, magisterial—you can’t beat it. In the years since I’ve acquired several more recordings, notably Bernstein/New York on Sony and Bernstein/Concertgebouw on DG. The New York is a reading on the other end of the spectrum, equally great, but different: with Bernstein I get the impression he’s conducting in a white fever having just gotten the score directly from the composer the ink still wet on the pages. It’s a very theatrical performance—I mean this in the best sense of the word—it’s almost like another opera that Beethoven never wrote—and more dramatic than any other performance I’m aware of, with particular attention to the meaning of the text. If you don’t know it, do acquire it. BTW: Sony’s remasterings of its classical back catalogue I think are second to none, almost always better than the latter vinyl reissues with the dark grey label and orange lettering. If you can find two- and six-eye vintage vinyl in good shape, by all means get them. But it’s still hard to beat the new transfers on CD. (I am also very moved by Harnoncourt, who made his recording not long before his death: very inward looking and lyrical.)

      • 2025-06-26 05:16:39 PM

        EAD wrote:

        Thanks Paul for your reply. I will try to get the Bernstein New York Solemnis. And I will also try to get the Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

        I love the Beethoven piano sonatas and have acquired several box-editions (e.g. Daniel Barenboim, Ronald Brautigam on Forte Piano, Igor Levit, Alfred Brendel) the last couple of years. All different performances but equally dear to me.

        Thanks again and best wishes!

        • 2025-06-26 05:31:13 PM

          Paul Seydor wrote:

          I reviewed the Levit for TAS, and really love it. You might also enjoy Richard Goode on Nonesuch, as solid an all around recommendation as you can get, Charles Rosen on the late sonatas, and Uchida, Rosen, and Serkin on the Diabellis. But there are so many great ones, including of course Arrau!

          • 2025-06-27 05:06:24 PM

            Mark Ward wrote:

            I love the Goode, and have long meant to explore the Levit. Time to take the plunge...

            • 2025-06-27 05:13:47 PM

              Paul Seydor wrote:

              He really is an amazing pianist: if you get the box or stream, go immediately the Appassionata and the Waldstein.

        • 2025-06-27 05:05:39 PM

          Mark Ward wrote:

          All the Bernstein Beethoven Sony/CBS recordings are gathered together in an excellently remastered 2019 box, hopefully still available. Vastly superior sound - worth every penny.

          • 2025-06-27 05:18:28 PM

            Paul Seydor wrote:

            The--all too brief--booklet note is written by a critic we both admire: Richard Osborne, who singles out how Bernstein brings out the bass lines. And he's right. And though he doesn't mention the wind player, no one except Klemperer in my experience features them the way Bernstein does, especially in New York (helped no doubt the miking--which in the newest remasterings I now like. If you caught Osborne's survey of the Beethoven seventh earliest this year in Gramophone, he singles out B's second NY 7th, writing that Bernstein "relishes everything and misses nothing." It's a fabulous performance. O adn I part company on the Vienna performance, which I think is great too, especially the allegretto.

      • 2025-06-26 05:28:14 PM

        Paul Seydor wrote:

        Eugene, I meant to add that I love the Pearlman version: beautiful violin sound, and he too makes the pieces very much his own, less fancifully than Dueñas, but many people might prefer something less overtly interventionist. There's room for so many, e.g., Alina Ibragimova, extremely refined, delicate almost inward looking, as individualistic in her own was as Dueñas, with some of the quiested violin playing I've ever heard (my friend Peter the violinist remarked that she pushes sotto voce about as far as it might be able to go!

        • 2025-06-29 07:57:15 AM

          EAD wrote:

          I have just had a first listen to the Dueñas Paganini. The sound is wonderful: very well recorded, 12 out of 11 imo! Her violin sound reminds me a bit of that of Maxim Vengorov, more on him later.

          But, I have to confess the Perlman is still my favourite. Although the sound is not as rich as Dueñas… it sounds lighter and very elegant. As a whole, I like his chosen tempi for the Paganini Caprices more. I did not have this with the other pieces by Dueñas on her album (e.g. the Saint-Saëns).

          For your info. I have good hopes acquiring the Bernstein Sony Beethoven Box (with the Missa Solemnis), and the Nikolaus Harnoncourt Missa Solemnis. Thanks, Paul, for mentioning those performances to me!

          I am not sure Maxim Vengerov, ever recorded all the Paganini Caprices on an album. Below is a link to a youtube video of a live performance of Paganini’s Caprice no. 24 with Vengorov. Not as perfect (perhaps), but with a lot of soul .… And yes the audience interferes (I cannot call it otherwise ;-)) near the end of the performance ….But I like to think similar disturbances by the audience might have happened when Paganini himself played…

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsJdLv38fy8

          And finally, a video with Heifetz with the same Caprice (in those days accompanied with piano) …imho genius….

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCqv5vm2iz4&list=RDpCqv5vm2iz4&start_radio=1

          Thanks again Paul for your article and recommendations and best wishes!

          • 2025-07-01 11:59:55 AM

            Paul Seydor wrote:

            I I would by no means, Eugene, wish to have anything I said or wrote be interpreted as a derogation from Perlman’s Caprices, which I think are fabulous. At this level we are talking about sheerly personal preferences (see Robert Becker’s reply below re: Perlman). I quite love the Perlman, and, as I said, it’s easy to imagine someone feeling that many Duenas is a little enthusiastic. One of my friends said, “I think she will do these much differently in ten years.” My reply to that is twofold: First, I should hope so, inasmuch as she’s plainly a highly intelligent, highly imaginative artist who will continue to grow. Second, but aren’t we glad she recorded this set now the way she did? I sure am, and I think it will never be superseded, just as Toscanini’s Verdi or Bernstein’s Mahler will never be superseded. There will be other ways of approaching the music, as there should be. But they won’t render these invalid or any the less desirable. By the way, Perlman’s violin is gorgeous sounding too—my violinist friend Peter tells his Strad is famous for being the best top to bottom tonally balanced there is.

            • 2025-07-01 12:01:15 PM

              Paul Seydor wrote:

              BTW: I love in the Vengerov the look on his face when the audience applauds the left-hand pizzicatos. He obviously wasn't expecting that but man does he ever relish the moment!

            • 2025-07-01 04:19:45 PM

              EAD wrote:

              I agree with all your comments Paul. At this level, it is personal preferences. Dueñas is a very gifted, astounding violinist, we will hear from more in the future.

              As a side note: The Harnoncourt Missa Solemnis, the Bernstein Beethoven 10CD Box (that also has the Missa Solemnis), arrived today together with the Giulini Warner Box (and the Klemperer Mahler 2). And, there are some other boxes I still have to listen to…. ;-).

              Thanks for your reply and thanks again for your recommendations!

  • 2025-06-26 05:13:39 PM

    Paul Seydor wrote:

    John, thanks so much for referencing Beethoven’s “sixth” piano concerto, arranged out of his “failed” violin concerto. Can we even begin to imagine how this glorious piece could have met with indifference, let alone neglect? What Beethoven said of his quartets evidently applied here too: “music for a later age.” I assume you know that when Beethoven made this arrangement he also wrote a cadenza for the first movement, a cadenza that brought in the tympani that opens the concerto. He never wrote a cadenza for the violin concerto, but once he made the piano arrangement, he arranged the piano cadenza for violin, complete with tympani addition. I’ve two recordings where violinists use the piano-to-violin cadenza: Wolfgang Schneiderhan with Jochum on DG and Christian Tetzlaff with Zinman on Arte Nova, both highly regarded and very good, Tetzlaff/Zinman really fast, lean, and mean with spanking clean clear recording, Schneiderhan/Jochum not slow but a bit closer to middle of the road. The cadenza is absolutely wild, almost like a miniature fantasia inside the larger movement.

  • 2025-06-27 05:32:40 PM

    Robert Becker wrote:

    Terrific review, a perfect match for a thrilling violinist equally new to me. This is as insightful (and comprehensive) a music review as I can recall, and I think music criticism the most difficult of all the realms of commentary. I couldn't agree more about the performances, unable to recall a better version of the Beethoven concerto. Aside from all the craft brilliance, her seamless command and confidence and downright bravado are, as you say, gobsmacking.

    I actually know the Paganini Caprices from my graduate school days, partly because they so cheerfully and bravely pushed the limits of playing but also because they to my ear transcended the 19th C, so varied and bold and experimental. Talk about bravado as I think Paginini knew how to have fun and yet communicate a wide range of emotions, moods, fantasies.

    I just listened to Duenas' Paganini and she is brilliant and perfectly "in tune" with the spirit of what can be at times off-the-wall caprices. I then put on the Perlman Caprices and even this good violinist didn't seem nearly as fluid or elegant, as if he was working at it -- he didn't convey the joy of playing around, as does Duenas. Her playing here is at least as good as her Beethoven. The Saint-Saens is excellent as well and her effortlessness reminds me of another favorite, the semi-romantic A. Rubinstein playing Chopin, at his most fluid, elegant and balanced best. Both players (in the best sense of the word) don't just play the music but magically exfoliate the music, the neatest performance artifice I know.

    Glad in these dark days you have found and articulated in depth the joyfulness of great music -- and your overview matches the superlative performances. Bravo to two masters.

    -- ex-literary critic and founder, SOTA Industries, survivor of the turntable wars and founder/investor of the HDCD process for high digital enhancement (Pacific Microsonics)

    • 2025-06-28 07:03:44 PM

      Paul Seydor wrote:

      Robert, thanks so much for the generous and appreciative review. To all and sundry who may be reading this, Robert Becker Robert was the business and marketing end of the company, David Fletcher the design and engineering end. SOTA continues strong and better than ever to this day, under different ownership, though until he passed away some years ago, Fletcher was retained as a design and engineering consultant. The SOTA Cosmos with vacuum holddown is, in my view, the second-best American turntable ever made—the first is one of the late AJ Conti’s Basis turntables, which AJ was the first to admit was partly inspired by Fletcher’s designs, notably the tuned suspension and vacuum holddlown (Fletcher felt that AJ’s arms were the best unipivots ever made, with which I am tempted to concur, as a Basis setup is one of my references). Fletcher also made what in my view was arguably the first truly state of the art arm—The Arm, which superseded only by the SME Model V. Many have superseded it since, but keep in mind this was the early eighties. Among the things David admired most about the SME V was that the arm was diecast a single piece, something he didn’t have the start-up capital to do at Sumiko, where The Arm was marketed. The SOTA Sapphire and SOTA Cosmos are still among the best tables you can buy. Anyhow, thank you again, Robert, for the kind words and the wonderful memories. I never knew you were familiar with Paganini. Back in the day I recall you like lots of baroque music.