The American musicologist Raymond Erickson has documented more than 200 versions of JS Bach’s Chaconne, ranging from the original for unaccompanied violin to transcriptions for violin and piano (Mendelssohn), piano left hand (Brahms), solo piano (Busoni), guitar, organ, orchestra (most famously Stokowski, with characteristic extravagance), saxophone (solo, quartet and octet) and beyond.

Three hundred years after its creation, the work continues to inspire composers and performers, as violinist Pauline Kim Harris celebrates on her new solo recording, ‘Wild at Heart’. This is Harris’s second CD for Sono Luminus exploring Bach’s masterpiece; her first, ‘Heroine’, includes Ambient Chaconne, an extended ‘reimagining’ of the piece she composed with Spencer Topel. By contrast, ‘Wild at Heart’ comprises short new ‘reincarnations’ of the Chaconne in which Harris revels in ethereal flights and virtuoso challenges. Bach rears his eloquent head throughout these scores, even as the 21st-century composers veer off into musical territory that often reflects the disc’s title.

Harris is always up to the task of taming the technical beasts. She makes her way through the juxtaposition of haunting phrases and daunting acrobatics in Yoon Ji Lee’s Shakonn (2014) with fearless vibrancy. Elizabeth Hoffman’s morsels wraps wisps of Bach around harmonics and silvery leaps, to which the violinist brings pinpoint accuracy.

Part of the impetus behind Annie Gosfield’s Long Waves and Random Pulses (2012) is a series of jammed radio signals the violin suggests amid suspenseful tremolos, frenetic figures and ghostlike hints of Bach. The album’s longest work, John King’s C H A C O N N E (2013), is also the most formidable in its extremes of range, technique and expressive contour. Once again, Harris is an exceptional narrator in full command of the instrument’s potential.