For me the litmus test with any recording of Paganini’s mighty ‘24’ is the ‘Trill’ Caprice (No 6), where a mournful melody dominates one line with a tremolo shimmering away on another. Given a sympathetic player the textural combination will break your heart. Such a player is the Chinese-born, Berlin-based violinist Ning Feng, who lifts the music out of the flashy virtuoso catchment and places it squarely among the noble masterpieces for the instrument.

Then you might care to access No 4, which opens to another soulful lament cast among multiple-stops, then switches to a choppy series of detached chords before temporarily returning us to the slower music, tone-poetry plain and simple, or at least that’s how it sounds in the hands of Ning Feng. The itching flea that is No 5 ricochets energetically. ‘How do you do that?’ I once asked Itzhak Perlman regarding this particular piece. ‘It’s easier than it looks’, he replied. Maybe for some, I thought. No 9, ‘La chasse’, has the violin’s A and E strings mimic the flutes while the G and D strings imitate the horns. Here Ning Feng’s double-stops are immaculate, his employment of dynamics and relative note lengths always imaginative.

Madcap up-bow staccatos dominate Caprice No 10 and, again, what most strikes me about Ning Feng’s playing is the way his colours shift from bar to bar, diverting your attention from technique pure and simple to its ultimate expressive destination. No 11 starts among haunting multiple voices before switching to dazzling high jinks. Maybe ‘The Devil’s Laughter’ (No 13) would have benefited from a touch more implied tomfoolery – Thomas Zehetmair (ECM, 12/09) is more wickedly suggestive here. Then again, Ning Feng throws off the devilishly difficult Caprice No 16, a continuous stream of semiquavers, as if it were child’s play; and as for No 17, its runs and octaves are more fun to listen to than to play, I’d imagine, but fun it is. I loved Ning Feng’s intimate way with No 18, with its smooth upper G string tone and rapid scales in thirds. No 20 (featuring a D string drone) highlights Ning Feng’s poetic bias, at least in the tranquil outer sections. As for the set’s most famous Caprice, No 24, endlessly varied by numerous composers, Ning Feng dispatches the music with lightness and aplomb. And there’s an unexpected extra – the elegant but demanding Caprice d’adieu (‘Farewell Capriccio’), written for the violinist Eduard Eliason.

Many violinists will be humbled by Ning Feng’s musical and technical capabilities but more important than that is his ability to make the music palatable for listeners who wouldn’t normally gravitate to a sequence of 25 unaccompanied violin miniatures. The more you listen, the more you want to listen. The competition is fierce, of course: Augustin Hadelich’s similarly imaginative set (Warner, 2/18) works equally well, while Salvatore Accardo (DG, 9/78), Itzhak Perlman (Warner, 6/72) and Zehetmair (a personal favourite) also warrant serious attention. But Ning Feng is up there with the best of them, and he’s beautifully recorded to boot.