This is sensational! In welcoming Korean violinist Sueye Park’s BIS album of the complete Paganini Caprices back in January 2018, I suggested that this excellent player countered the cliché of ‘Paganini as devil’ with an alternative image of Paganini as seducer. Remarkable as that programme is, ‘Journey Through a Century’ – the 20th century, that is – is finer still, and not only because Park is such an accomplished and imaginative player. As it happens, Paganini makes a showing here too, in Alfred Schnittke’s gripping polystylistic À Paganini (the original version, 1982) where, for one episode, recognisable shards from various Paganini Caprices are recalled, interpolated by powerful chords. Schnittke thought of himself as belonging to no one: ‘I am not Russian’, writes Park as she recalls the composer’s own words, ‘even if Russian is my mother tongue. But my real mother tongue was the half-forgotten, pseudo-German of the Volga Germans. Then I had the problem that I am half Jewish, even though I don’t speak Yiddish at all.’

Schnittke’s method is, in essence, to facilitate the phoenix’s birth by destroying the old – but always with a canny enough touch that you can hear the old and the new coexist. As with so much Schnittke, worrying disorientation sits at the music’s heart, but never so much that you lose interest or concentration. Turn to the case of Isang Yun, who grew up at a time when Korea was a Japanese colony, and you encounter another world of tragedy, one that’s no less disorientating. Of course, Korean identity was suppressed and Yun, who was active in Berlin trying to unite Korean and Western musics, was kidnapped by the South Korean secret service, taken to Seoul and sentenced to life imprisonment. Happily, and thanks to protests from the likes of Karajan, Ligeti and Stravinsky, he was released. Yun’s Königliches Thema (1976) takes the ‘royal theme’ from Bach’s A Musical Offering on a sort of East Asian outing with a touch of atonality for company. Penderecki’s Capriccio (2008) is a brief showpiece commissioned by Midori and Vadim Repin whereas Richard Strauss’s delightful late Daphne-Etüde for solo violin (1945), music based on a theme from the opera of the same name, was written for the composer’s grandson. As for Prokofiev’s Sonata in D of 1947, there’s an option to perform this brief albeit highly characteristic score either solo or as a unison ensemble piece. Park nails its jack-in-the-box stylistic variety and expressive bittersweetness with imagination, the central ‘theme with variations’ being the performance’s highlight.

Aside from Schnittke, the biggest work included is Weinberg’s seven-movement Sonata No 2 (1967). As with the music of his friend Shostakovich, the scream is muffled but listen closely enough and you’ll hear it. This ingenious piece consists of versicoloured movements with titles such as ‘Melody’, ‘Rests’, ‘Intervals’, ‘Replies’ and ‘Accompaniment’, each one trailing the last with an element of surprise while setting its own technical challenges.

And the rest? Reger’s expertly written D minor Prelude and Fugue (1909), an engaging piece composed for the young Adolf Busch, who had earlier on stunned the composer by playing his massive Violin Concerto from memory; Ysaÿe’s last Solo Sonata (1923), which was dedicated to the virtuoso Manuel Quiroga (frequently billed ‘the finest successor of Pablo de Sarasate’ and who sadly never actually performed the work in public), where a seductive habanera passage gives a clue as to the music’s Spanish prompt; and, from 1910, Fritz Kreisler’s Recitativo and Scherzo-caprice, which virtually levels with the Ysaÿe for musical quality. As it happens, the two composers maintained close contact and Kreisler dedicated this masterly piece to Ysaÿe. The playing here is quite beyond reproach, Park focusing the music’s mellow solemnity, sounding chords with a simultaneous chiming pizzicato in the Recitativo before switching to the typically Kreislerian wit of the Scherzo-caprice.

Park’s own booklet notes, to which I am greatly indebted, are outstanding and at no point in the programme do you feel that the technical and intellectual demands are in any way compromising her interpretations, which are wholly excellent. She freely admits that this is only a ‘selection’ of pieces that are dear to her and ‘that it isn’t possible to take all the important works into account’, which hopefully leaves room in her (and BIS’s) schedule for further volumes along similar lines. The recording captures Park’s instrument with amazing realism, and those with Super Audio CD capability can benefit further still from BIS’s exceptionally well-balanced engineering. If this isn’t a potential Gramophone Award-winner, I don’t know what is.