One unbroken sentence: María Dueñas lets Beethoven breathe at Suntory Hall

At Suntory Hall, Fabio Luisi and the NHK Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo opened with Tōru Takemitsu’s Three Film Scores, a succinct calling card for the band’s corporate poise. Line was polished without fuss, inner balances were neatly aligned, and phrasing felt unforced. As a curtain‑raiser it did its job: it showed an ensemble able to turn micro‑gestures into meaning and then stepped aside for the main argument.

From María Dueñas’ first entrance in Beethoven's Violin Concerto, one sensed a performer who refuses to spend all her air in one phrase. She “banks” breath, husbanding bow speed and vibrato so that the last syllable of one sentence becomes the first syllable of the next. Where a slower basic pulse can tempt the music into discrete parcels, she welded units together with continuity of legato and discreet, phrase‑end rubatos that released tension rather than advertised it. In the early, ascending octave passage, she stole a hairline of time before the apex and then placed the top note with a singer’s inevitability, so the cadence felt earned rather than underlined. Crucially, her ears stayed open to the orchestra: woodwind inflections or a string choir’s slight colour‑shift drew immediate, chamber‑like replies from the solo line.

Some listeners will have come longing for the romantic weight of David Oistrakh’s warm, ample tone or for the sober, architectonic rigour of Joseph Joachim’s German school. Dueñas stands elsewhere, favouring clarity of line. Through her focused, lightly engraved tone over sheer amplitude, she let Beethoven’s armature show. Inner parts gained a chamber transparency; conversations with the woodwinds acquired an almost confidential intimacy. If that means less plushness at climaxes than the late‑Romantic, continent‑spanning tradition prizes, the trade‑off is structural light and air. Heard this way, her Beethoven belongs to a post‑Historically Informed new Romanticism – historically alert in its priorities yet frankly lyrical in its rhetoric. 

The Larghetto brought Dueñas’ long‑line method into even finer relief. She kept dynamics near the stave – pianissimo and under – so that meaning lived in inflection and breath, not in weight. A short, self‑effacing transitional cadenza (more bridge than display) seemed to glance toward the finale’s rhythmic profile, knitting the arch of the evening without breaking the spell; it is a choice with precedents and, done as subtly as here, one that heightens the sense of a single span. Compared with her recording, the live reading felt less curated and more airborne: the same underlying aesthetic – broad paragraphs, self‑authored cadential writing – now projected with freer respiration, the give‑and‑take with orchestra more tactile in the room, because the timing of tension and release – when to resist, when to let go – was felt moment to moment rather than fixed.

Mendelssohn’s Symphony no. 4 in A major, “Italian”, closed at brisk clips. Luisi’s quicksilver pacing clarified edges and brightened articulation, but the overture‑like sheen sometimes came at the cost of headroom, especially in the Saltarello, where the headlong speed flirted with breathlessness and, briefly, with ensemble strain. If the pay‑off was excitement – and there was plenty – one occasionally missed a more lingering chiaroscuro. The through‑line remained firm, however, and the NHKSO responded with discipline and bite even when pressed hard. Local reactions have already noted both the electric thrust and the dangers of that approach; this performance sat squarely in that trade‑off. 

All evening, though, the centre was Dueñas: less about display than about the living drama between held breath and release, about turning the concerto’s long walk into one unbroken sentence. In that sense, she didn’t merely play Beethoven; she let the piece breathe.