Hugo Ticciati clearly delights in the elusive. His biography, unlike those of his colleagues, does not mention a single orchestra or musician he has played with by name, but rather that he recently spent two weeks ‘in an ashram at the foot of the Himalayas where he chanted every morning, meditated and swept the floors by day, and in the evenings sat cross-legged by a fire, playing Bach to barefooted monks’. While extreme devotion to mindfulness might not be for everyone, this release from O/Modernt deserves 55 minutes and 22 seconds of your time. There are so many good things about ‘From the Ground Up: The Chaconne’ that I worry this review will read like a shopping list for loveliness. First, there are the delightful little chaconnes scattered throughout the album. Ticciati surrounds himself with instrumentalists so at one with the chaconne repertoire, musicians who bring the genre’s inherent sexiness and sway to every note. Christoph Sommer and Karl Nyhlin’s plucking in Domenico Pellegrini’s Chiaccona is utterly beautiful, unravelling and gathering momentum with psychic ease and synchronised breath; dissonances are resolved with unworked sincerity; and when you think the chaconne has reached its peak and can blossom no more, Cecilia Knudtsen’s scalic lines emerge from the texture like fragile sunshine.

Ticciati’s own performance of Bach’s Chaconne, which forms the heart of the album, is something that warms into gloriousness. For the most part, Ticciati’s interpretation is careful and inconsistently persuasive in its rhetoric. He is most strong when ‘improvisation’ and ‘breath’ return to the narrative: the ethereal spinning and ghostly bariolage, for example, illuminates moments where Bach’s writing needn’t be so monumental or grand. Yet it is a monument, and so it pains me to say: Bach’s Chaconne doesn’t fit here. It is selfish in what it takes from the pieces that surround it, trading the corporeal flesh of dance for cerebral intensity (in this interpretation at least), and interrupts what is otherwise an impeccable sense of flow between works. The meditative presence generated by the three improvisations – ‘Ground’, ‘Being’, and ‘Breath’ – threatens to be undone by the Bach. Which is a shame, as these improvisations are special indeed. We are immersed in an elemental landscape in which, honestly, I’m not entirely sure what I’m listening to: violin harmonics transform into gleaming streaks of percussion, Gareth Lubbe’s harmonic singing spills into the resonance of something plucked, perhaps bowed.
O/Modernt improvise music that flows between the performers’ bodies as if it were the oxygen that they share. That this ‘music’ then feeds the very ground upon which we stand – CD sales are donated to the WWF forests initiative – is not only a charming pun on the chaconne, but makes the circle whole: this is music that comes from the earth given back to the earth.

Particular mention must go to the stunning performances of the three percussionists on the album: Nora Thiele’s omnipresent generosity and rhythmic support, Leandro Mancini-Olivos’s drums that drip with cool, and Elsa Bradley’s electric playing in Johannes Marmén’s Inside One Breath that induces panic even in the hardiest of listeners. Mancini-Olivos is the glue that makes the three Purcell remixes that close the album so slick. In these, Shakespearean verse and Baba Israel’s spoken word (evocative improvisations such as ‘her touch rises my spirit as we walk through streets expanding like maps’) are imaginatively superimposed on the harmonic and rhythmic patterns of Purcell. Henrik Måwe’s piano-playing in Dido’s Lament – which has more than a hint of ‘Where is the love?’ by Black Eyed Peas, that smash hit of 2003 – sparkles with the freedom of a summer in New York. But, to quote Baba Israel, ‘even that is too flowery … there are no words that can capture your rapture’. So put on the kettle, give this disc a spin, and maybe in under an hour you’ll also be booking flights to Kathmandu: whatever Ticciati’s drinking, I want some too.