In the booklet note to this second album of hers for DG, María Dueñas notes that while Paganini wrote his 24 Caprices, each a formidable technical exercise covering a different aspect of advanced violin technique, for himself to study and play, ‘today they are concert works, so we need to reveal the music behind the technique’. In this belief, she stands with all violinists (or at least any worth their musical salt). However, she also points out both that Paganini’s wider musical surroundings were that of bel canto opera, and that in her own Spanish mother tongue, capricho means ‘taking a liberty with something – anything from food to music’. Combine all three ideas and you have the beginnings of a description for the resultant dazzling readings we have here – and I do mean dazzling, because I’d be hard-pushed to name another modern recording offering anything close to the multicoloured lyrical imagination produced by this 22-year-old. The only other that to my ears has them sounding genuinely like newly minted musical works, rather than colourfully musical technical studies, is Alina Ibragimova’s very different, more introverted set.

Jump, for instance, to No 3 in E minor, its opening double-stops boldly wide-swaggering, with vocal-style portamento of varying sizes connecting each to the next, and a little push injected into the second trilled dotted minim’s second beat in a pre-echo of the following bar’s off beat semiquaver accents – together, a complement of musically and dramatically inspired macro- and micro-colouring, arguably with a tiny articulation liberty taken, bursting with operatic stage presence. Fabulous.

I could just as easily cite the very opening Caprice No 1 in E, singing with show-stoppingly bright, lyrical panache; or the panoply of articulation and phrasing, and development of dramatic narrative, that we’ve been treated to before even a minute is up of No 2’s sobbing soprano figures. No 5’s blizzards of ricochet bowings are genuinely the mere vehicle for a compellingly, poetically shaped musical story that pulls your ear even more than the technical flash. No 8 is a roller-coaster ride of high-contrast twists and turns which, despite a thrilling degree of metrical freedom, hangs tightly architecturally together. Or for a multifaceted masterclass in innately, flexibly handled rubato, emotive architecture and multi-voice colouring, head to her sublime No 10 in C. Oh, and while it hardly needs saying, it’s clearly many years since these technical finger puzzles felt as such under Dueñas’s luminously radiant and golden-toned, fluidly quicksilver technique – and beyond left-hand dexterity, take a moment (or several) to lock your ear in on the spectacular control over contact and tonal palette she’s working over the hairiest right-hand wildness. Add it all up, and I’ve found myself gripped in flabbergasted admiration and enjoyment at each fresh listen. It is so good, so musically radiant and so lyrical. The studio capturing is also fantastic, sounding immediate without being uncomfortably close, and with a nice, natural sense of gently supportive room behind her instrument – a Nicolò Gagliano.

Such Caprice interpretations would be enough by themselves, but Dueñas has then taken the theme and run with it over a second, equally poetically virtuoso disc whose stylistically wide-ranging programme – performed on the other instrument she currently plays, the Stradivarius ‘Camposelice’ of 1710 – throws out constant reminders of where we’ve come from. First up is Caprice basque by Dueñas’s Romantic-era countryman Pablo Sarasate, featuring the left-hand popping pizzicato and extreme high-register work pioneered by Paganini, and smartly partnered here by Itamar Golan. Also the Milstein Caprice written for Dueñas in 2022 by a modern-day countryman of hers, Jordi Cervelló (1935-2022), and so named because it was Milstein who Dueñas’s huskily rich lyricism reminded Cervelló of – and with her wild, sul ponticello-coloured reading of its middle section recalling the bridge-rattling central storm she’d earlier unleashed within Paganini’s Caprice No 19. Another work written expressly for her (one suspects Dueñas will be inspiring many new works over the course of her career) is Gabriela Ortiz’s fascinating, rhythmically capricious De cuerda y madera, receiving its premiere recording with Alexander Malofeev her responsive pianist partner.

More joys: Wieniawski’s Étude-caprice in E flat for two violins, Dueñas’s chocolately old-school romantic sound marrying with that of Boris Kuschnir in meltingly singing, non exercise y fashion; Raphaël Feuillâtre her partner for Kreisler’s Caprice viennois arranged for violin and guitar, a medium Paganini himself wrote for with tremendous charm; then vibrantly, swooshingly dancing, singing and love-making Saint-Saëns and Berlioz with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under Mihhail Gerts to ramp things up to a high-octane climax – these three captured with complementary warm fullness at the Berlin Teldex Studio.

Dueñas’s Beethoven debut album (8/23) impressed for the finesse-filled distinctiveness and confidence of her voice, and the sense of a youthful old soul with plenty of her own to say. Her Paganini exceeds it by some measure.