María Dueñas, a Spanish violinist currently completing her two-year stint as a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, isn’t the first to record Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with a range of cadenzas. Ruggiero Ricci did so almost 30 years ago, taking in 13 cadenzas by 12 composers. Dueñas limits herself to just five but provides added context to the project by pairing the concerto with complementary violin-orchestral works by the five selected composers.

It’s an enticing prospect, made more remarkable when you realise this is also Dueñas’s debut recording; she doesn’t turn 21 until December. Even were that not the case, it’s a mightily impressive statement of intent. The manner in which Dueñas acquits herself is nothing short of remarkable: every technical hurdle surmounted with assurance, no lapses in tone or intonation, the interpretation confident and persuasive. She takes an unhurried view of the work, the first movement alone stretching to nearly 28 minutes, going for consistency and continuity rather than moment-to-moment flashiness. Her tone has ideal richness in the slow movement and sparkles in the finale, which all the same remains rather straight-faced, drawing back from adding the last ounce of twinkle to make a romp of the rondo.

Dueñas provides her own cadenzas in the concerto itself, her chosen five historical offerings for the first-movement cadenza occupying a second disc lasting 18 minutes. Spohr offers little more than strings of arpeggios (apparently he didn’t like the piece), while the later composers offer either thematic musings (Saint-Saëns) or go the whole virtuoso hog. These include Kreisler, ingeniously piling themes one on top of the other; Wieniawski, playing to his own violinistic strengths; and Ysaÿe, who incorporates such modernities as left-hand pizzicato and double-stopped ornaments. ‘One’s comfort’, wrote a sniffy 19th-century critic, ‘is that since Ysaÿe could hardly play them himself, nobody else is likely to be able to play them at all.’ Phooey – it’s fascinating, and only a pity that in this format each cadenza can’t be programmed into the work to judge and compare.

Elsewhere Dueñas’s violin sings gorgeously over the darker accompaniment of Ysaÿe’s Berceuse and enters a dialogue with the sonorous harp of Volker Kempf in a Spohr Adagio; she makes her tone by turns sultry in Saint-Saëns’s Havanaise (the faster music at last showing her playful side), enigmatic in Wieniawski’s Légende and honeyed in Kreisler’s evergreen Liebesleid. What a player, and what a way to launch a recording career.