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The piano’s range and expressive capabilities make it ideally suited for single-instrument communication, but other solo works have interesting elements of their own. Romanian composer Violeta Dinescu (born 1953) has created a number of pieces for solo violin, and Irina Muresanu offers a generous selection of them on a new (+++) Métier CD. The disc opens with the extended single-movement Aretusa, which quickly establishes Dinescu’s interest in using the violin’s highest extremes and a potpourri of technical elements in pacing, bowing and fingering to produce as wide-ranging an impression as possible. The piece is technically impressive, and Muresanu plays it very well, but listening to it in its entirety of 16½ minutes is a bit of a chore. It is followed on the disc by a six-movement suite called Vista, whose movement titles, in Italian, are intended to be evocative and perhaps a trifle mysterious: La casa è mia e non è mia, Non è vero? Non è vero? – and so on. There is no clear or obvious connection between the words and the music, but the brevity of the individual pieces, each of which explores a mood without dwelling on it, is welcome. Again, the demonstration of violin technique seems to be a major element of the individual movements and the suite as a whole: pizzicati, glissandi, slides, spiccato and more are proffered and effectively displayed in Muresanu’s playing. There is more of the same technical prowess in the service of technique in the five single-movement pieces that follow the Vista suite. They are called Satya I, Il faudrait d’abord désespérer (which translates as “we should first despair”), Für Uli, À chaque épée de lumière (which translates as “with every sword of light”), and Pour triumpher du soleil. The pieces differ in numerous significant ways, but all are cut from similar cloth in their emphasis on the technical elements of violin playing and the intellectual ones associated with listening to a thorough exploration of the instrument’s sonic capabilities. In all cases, though, any real sense of connectivity with an audience is missing: the works seem to have little to say beyond what their titles assert – and since the relationship between verbiage and sound is never made clear, the music could go as well with other titles as well as with whatever one is assigned to it. The final offering on the disc is a suite of three three-minute pieces collected as De-ale Lupului, which translates from Romanian as “of the wolf.” Once again, despite the title, there is nothing particularly lupine about the material here: it requires considerable skill in everything from double stopping to production of harmonics, but its most-intriguing element is the sudden brief, inexplicable intrusion of human voices amid the violin phrases. Violinists will find Muresanu’s playing well worth contemplating, perhaps even emulating in comparable repertoire, but more-casual listeners will not find a great deal here with which they will be able to connect.