Back in 2014 Hilary Hahn spoke warmly to Gramophone about the music of Antón García Abril (b1933), who had written three encore-length pieces with her in mind. Best known in his native Spain for TV and film soundtracks, Abril has an extensive catalogue of concert works including ballets, cantatas and concertos; mostly unrecorded, though a search online will turn up a jaunty piano concerto with Bartókian solo writing, and a picaresque Concerto aguediano originally recorded by the guitarist Ernesto Bitetti for the Spanish division of EMI.

‘A lot of composers forget that the violin is also capable of polyphony’, Hahn remarked, and Abril has produced a cycle of six Partitas rich in counterpoint, both implicit (as in his stated model of Bach) and worked out through intricate multiple-stopping. If Hahn’s bombproof technical command is tested, it doesn’t show in these heavily produced recordings, released on LP and for online download and streaming. Turn up the volume or listen on headphones and you’ll hear a thick impasto of background noise, as if recorded in a long tunnel or perhaps to evoke the swish of an old LP, though the effect is the same on the digital files. Sometimes, too, the microphone catches the slightest pressure of finger on string; at others it steps back for a more normal perspective.

The titles for each Partita encompass big ideas: ‘Heart’, ‘Immensity’, ‘Love’, ‘Art’, ‘Reflective’ and, presumably directed at Hahn, ‘You’. The direction of travel in the rhapsodic outer panels can be hard to follow, whereas the toccata-like energy of ‘Immensity’ springs from a 20th-century tradition of solo violin-writing exemplified by Ysaÿe and Hindemith, opening with a syncopated Bartókian fantasy on an open string. The cycle is strongest, and Hahn’s playing most captivating, when Abril draws on his native heritage. ‘Love’ alternates sinuous cantilenas with wild declarations of passion: this is the world of Falla’s La vida breve, and of malagueñas imagined by Ravel and Shostakovich.

In lieu of booklet notes we are directed towards YouTube for several short films of Hahn appearing with Abril and discussing each Partita in turn, though more pertinent context is offered by a pair of three-minute interviews uploaded by Washington Performing Arts before her first performance of the cycle’s second half. I remain unconvinced and mostly unmoved by the melodically threadbare material of these pieces and their diffuse, often strenuously overworked development, but Hahn plays them with complete belief in every note.