Maria Dueñas’ New York recital debut was spectacular

Dueñas with Alexander Malofeev in the Weill Recital Hall.
Photo: Fadi Kheir

About 250 lucky listeners packed into Weill Hall last night to hear 22-year-old violinist Maria Dueñas make her New York debut, and by the time she hit the first few notes, it was clear she had already outgrown the venue. It’s a delightful moment at the start of a great career when a musical personality floods a room. Dueñas will likely never play Weill again, as economics dictate that he will soon graduate to Carnegie Hall’s grand main stage. Which makes me grateful for that night’s difficult balance of intimacy and grandeur, nuance and explosiveness.

Dueñas and pianist Alexander Malofeev shared the same sense of breath, quality of attack and rhythmic elasticity, so that, like Olympic-level figure skaters, they seemed lighter and more agile as a pair than they might have been each on its own. In Franck’s sonata, Malofeev scored rich, dense chords for Dueñas to spin. Every time Dueñas slowed down, hovering in the air for a moment before landing, Malofeev was there to catch her in the negative rhythm. This partnership provided a spectacular U.S. premiere of Gabriela Ortiz’s “De cuerda y madera,” a score tailor-made for Dueñas’ talent for fusing joy and soul. Chamber musicians have a certain margin of approximation in the standard repertoire, since everyone knows how it goes. Not so with new music, where a tentative performance can result in disconcerting darkness. Here, Dueñas played Ortiz’s wild dances and atmospheric brilliance as if she had grown up with the material. In a way, he has: Two years ago (an eon in the life of such a young musician), he performed Ortiz’s violin concerto. Altar of Ropeand the affinity between them suggests one of the great composer-performer associations, such as Rostropovich and Shostakovich.

Dueñas is not only good; she is distinctive. In a program that overflowed with encores of Von Vecsey, Piazzolla and Debussy, he charged each note with a vibrant energy that soared to the plaster walls and drew the audience into the sound with electromagnetic force. This sustained intensity can be tiring (perhaps in time, she’ll incorporate some casual charm or nonchalance into her emotional repertoire), but it’s exciting and a little dangerous to be in the presence of so much personality in a small space. You can hear all the little sonic byproducts that disappear in a bigger room: the little scrapes, pops, and crunches that result from the friction of horsehair, strings, wood, and flesh. Listening this closely, one can also distinguish Dueñas’ astonishing range of colors: the burnished sunset orange of Franck’s melancholic melody, the lavender pallor of a high pianissimo, or a sustained note that hangs like a thread of midnight blue. Many classical musicians have the kind of technical virtuosity that is both impressive and simple; expressive virtuosity like Dueñas’, the ability to guide a piece through a complex emotional landscape without losing narrative coherence, that is infinitely rarer.