About 250 lucky listeners packed into Weill Hall last night to hear the 22-year-old violinist Maria Dueñas give her New York recital debut, and by the time she had played the first few notes, it was clear she had already outgrown the venue. It’s a delicious moment early in a great career when a musical personality floods a room. Dueñas will probably never play in Weill again, since economics dictate that she’ll soon graduate to Carnegie Hall’s vast main stage. Which makes me grateful for that one night’s elusive balance of intimacy and grandeur, nuance and explosiveness.
Dueñas and the 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 nimbler as a pair than each would have been on their own. In the Franck sonata, Malofeev staked out rich, dense chords for Dueñas to twirl through. Whenever Dueñas pulled back the tempo, remaining airborne for a moment before landing, Malofeev was there to catch her on the downbeat. That partnership delivered a spectacular U.S. premiere of Gabriela Ortiz’s “De cuerda y madera,” a score tailored for Dueñas’s talent for merging playfulness and soul. Chamber musicians have a certain leeway for approximation in standard repertoire, since everyone knows how it goes. Not so with new music, where a tentative performance can result in puzzling murk. Here, Dueñas played Ortiz’s wild dances and atmospheric sparkle as if she’d grown up on the stuff. In a way, she has: Two years ago (an eon in the life of such a young musician), she performed Ortiz’s violin concerto Altar de Cuerda, and the affinity between them suggests one of the great composer-performer partnerships, like Rostropovich and Shostakovich.
Dueñas isn’t just good; she’s distinctive. In a program that spilled over into encores by Von Vecsey, Piazzolla, and Debussy, she charged each note with a buzzing energy that rocketed toward the plaster walls and drew the audience into the sound with electromagnetic force. Such sustained intensity can be tiring — perhaps over time, she’ll incorporate a little casual charm or insouciance into her emotional repertoire — but it’s exciting and a little dangerous to be in the presence of so much personality in a confined space. You can hear all the little sonic by-products that vanish in a bigger hall: the little scrapes and knocks and creaks that result from the friction of horsehair, string, wood, and flesh. Listening up close like that, you can also make out Dueñas’s staggering range of colors: the burnished sunset orange of Franck’s wistful melody, the lavender pallor of a high pianissimo, or a sustained note hanging like a thread of midnight blue. Plenty of classical musicians have the kind of technical virtuosity that’s simultaneously impressive and glib; expressive virtuosity like Dueñas’s, the ability to guide a piece through a complex emotional landscape without losing narrative coherence — that is infinitely rarer.
