There may be plenty of new music being written for violin but not on a small enough scale to present new and interesting encores. So Hilary Hahn has over the years gradually commissioned a compendium of works for just that purpose which incidentally, in the process, takes the listener through every area of strength in her own technique (leaving none of weakness, in case you were wondering).

‘In 27 Pieces’ may represent a broad compass of styles, cultures and epochs, presented by an equally broad group of composers, but it is the ability of Hahn, and her accompanist Cory Smythe to bring out the individualities of each tiny vignette that lifts this disc from helpful reference for small-scale repertoire to satisfyingly cohesive collection of new works. Cohesive not just because each was written for Hahn herself and therefore goes some way towards representing her, but for the fact that she takes the composers’ enormous variety of aspects on her playing and performs them as if she were a different player: in each, an actor unrecognisable from her previous role.

The programming is equally ingenious, avoiding the relentlessness it is sometimes possible to sense in a long line-up of free standing pieces. There is certainly challenging music here – not least The Angry Birds of Kauai by Jeff Myers, which won Hahn’s blind internet competition for the 27th space on the disc, and Elliott Sharp’s Storm of the Eye – but it is satisfying to discover, piece by piece, that the works by composers that would automatically be assumed to stand out from the rest are not necessarily the gems of the disc. In particular, those by Rautavaara, Jennifer Higdon and Mark-Anthony Turnage strike the listener less as independent pieces but as music that would function better as part of a larger work. The true ingenuity here is to be found in works such as light moving by American composer David Lang, which pulls folk influences together into a traditional perpetuum mobile focus, and in the great beauty of Somei Satoh’s Bifu, and Mercy by Max Richter. This apparantly niche-repertoire disc may be ‘specialist’ but it is also a valuable investment in the future.