María Dueñas Plays Sibelius

María Dueñas won the Menuhin Violin Competition in 2021, aged just 18. Since then she has gathered rave reviews and a devoted global fanbase, and she ‘held the audience in the palm of her hand’ (The Guardian) in her BBC Proms debut in 2023. Hear her in Sibelius’ expressive and deeply personal Violin Concerto, one of the undisputed pinnacles of the violin repertoire. Submarea, by Swedish composer Mats Larsson Gothe, was commissioned as a score for Joakim Odelberg’s awe-inspiring underwater film of the wild Nordic coast, shown on the Royal Festival Hall’s huge screen. Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony is a striking example of his inventive – some would say irreverent – attitude to traditional musical forms. It has just two movements, and at its heart is a passage in which the snare drum player is instructed to improvise ‘as though determined at all costs to stop the progress of the orchestra’. Though he never claimed this was music ‘about’ the First World War, Nielsen spoke of a battle between the forces of evil and the forces of nature, ‘peaceful and unaffected’, in this dramatic symphony.