Paganini: 24 Caprices — Caprices by Berlioz, Cervelló, Kreisler, Ortiz, Saint-Saëns, Sarasate, Wieniawski

Rumours that Niccolò Paganini was possessed by the devil became believable whenever he played one of his 24 Caprices for solo violin. Audience members often fainted thanks to the intensity of the demonic fiddler’s performances and total command of his instrument. María Dueñas owns both the technique and temperament to animate Paganini’s fiendishly difficult technical studies. She also knows how to extract the rich musical substance that lies beneath their flashy surface. The Spanish violinist, born in Granada in 2002, made her recording debut with Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, a brave choice of repertoire for such a young musician. Her follow-up is this sensational recording of the Paganini Caprices. For good measure, Dueñas’ album includes a host of equally demanding pieces inspired by Paganini’s works or by the volatile nature of the musical capriccio. María Dueñas has lived with Paganini’s Caprices since early childhood. She began listening to them from the moment she first picked up a violin and started playing them remarkably soon after. “They have accompanied me for so many years,” she tells Apple Music Classical. “And after recording the Beethoven Concerto, I wanted to do something that was also very personal to me. I feel very close to these pieces. Of course, I began playing them as everyone else does, so to say, for myself, to perfect some technical aspects. But later I started performing some of the Caprices at competitions and as encore pieces. I’ve developed a very close relationship to them.” Paganini, says Dueñas, conceived his Caprices for private study, not for public consumption. Although considered to be unplayable by his contemporaries, he proved that they were by introducing several to the concert stage. They soon became the supreme test of a violinist’s technique. Their high musical quality, meanwhile, secured their place in company with Chopin’s Etudes for piano. The famous final Caprice, a set of 11 variations on a memorable theme, makes exacting demands on the player’s bowing and left-hand technique. Many other composers, Rachmaninoff, Lutosławski, Ysaÿe and Andrew Lloyd Webber among them, were inspired to write variations on Paganini’s catchy tune. Beyond the jaw-dropping accuracy of her playing, Dueñas brings out the singing line in each of the Caprices. Listen to Caprice No. 3, for instance, with its melancholy opening, played in octaves on two different strings, or the otherworldly tremolos of the sixth Caprice, in which the melody and their rapid-fire accompaniment emerge as clear as day in Dueñas’ performance. “The violin offers so many possibilities,” she observes. “I think it’s very close to the human voice. So every time I play, I imagine singing for sure. It should feel as close as possible to one’s voice and to one’s emotions.” Does she sing? “I like to sing,” she replies. “But I sing badly!” The Italian word “capriccio” refers to a flight of fancy, something created in the moment. “I associate ‘capriccio’ with a feeling of improvisation and a very free, fantasising character,” Dueñas comments. “Each of Paganini’s Caprices is unique, involving so many different technical aspects for sure. Virtuosity is the basic and most important thing, of course, but you still have to show something more from that. Paganini was influenced by the bel canto opera from his time. I think that style suits what can be said through his music.” María Dueñas left her homeland when she was 11 to study in Germany, and moved to Vienna three years later to take lessons from Boris Kuschnir. The Ukrainian Austrian violinist joins his star pupil on her album in an impassioned performance of the second of Henri Wieniawski’s Études-Caprices, Op. 18. Guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre is Dueñas’ duet partner in a seductive arrangement of Fritz Kreisler’s Caprice viennois, while the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and conductor Mihhail Gerts step up for Saint-Saëns’ evergreen Introduction et rondo capriccioso, his lyrical Caprice andalous and Berlioz’s eloquent Rêverie et caprice, a work that deserves to be much better known. The album also contains two new works, both written for Dueñas: De cuerda y madera, a dramatic capriccio for violin and piano by Gabriela Ortiz, and Jordi Cervelló’s suitably capricious Milstein Caprice. “I wanted to show with this choice of pieces from past and present everything that a capriccio can be,” says Dueñas. She also selected compositions, those by Saint-Saëns not least among them, that reflect the Spanish temperament. “Something that strikes me every time I go back to Spain is this sense of valuing life, that everyone is very grateful for life and enjoying life. I think this sense of enjoyment is something that comes across strongly among Spanish people. That’s the way I see it and the way I try to express it in this music.”