This intelligently assembled recital of contemporary solo violin music provides a vivid portrait of Michael Jinsoo Lim’s first-class musicianship and technical finesse. Listeners with an interest in new American music may know Lim (and his wife, viola player/composer Melia Watras) as members of the superb Corigliano Quartet, and since 2009 Lim has also served as concertmaster of the Pacific Northwest Ballet.

Lim has showmanship to spare, as demonstrated most pointedly in Corigliano’s STOMP, written for the 2011 Tchaikovsky Competition. Lim’s reading is thrilling in its virtuosity yet offers charm and a sense of fun as well. I find Philippe Quint more dazzling in his recording of Corigliano’s The Red Violin Caprices (Naxos, 9/08), but Lim’s emphasis on lyricism pays handsome dividends, too.

Paola Prestini’s A Jarful of Bees (2020) for violin and electronics is one of the strongest new works here, full of imaginative, evocative sounds and eventful enough that its 11 minutes seem to buzz by in a flash. Leilehua Lanzilotti’s where we used to be (2022) appears to be quite simple on its surface, yet its exquisite proportions and the composer’s ear for colour made me hit the repeat button quite a few times.

Of Watras’s three works, I find the Doppelgänger Dances (2017) the most appealing. The composer writes that she was inspired by doppelgänger stories (particularly Dostoevsky, Gogol and Poe) as well as the ‘double’ in the Baroque variation sense. There are a lot of distorted echoes in these seven miniatures, and a welcome variety of style and expression. And in A dance of honey and inexorable delight (2022) she manages to integrate spoken word – authoritatively read here by the poet Herbert Woodward Martin (b1933) – with sensitivity.

Really, the only disappointment here is that Lim didn’t include all of Astor Piazzolla’s six Tango-Études (1987), as he plays these three here with terrific swagger and that essential hint of melancholy.