The slim slices of ‘bread’ that sandwich this debut album from Ground Floor (which, as much as I try to get used to it, is a weird name for an ensemble) are outstanding. An unfamiliar version of the Lachrime – that familiar tune after John Dowland, here by Johann Schop – opens the album in eerie evocation. Violinist Alice Julien-Laferrière sketches out divisions with the fragility of a morning cobweb, emerging from this tracery only for brief moments of pungent, gravity-defying chromaticism.

It is an enticing opening that promises so much. Unfortunately, standards are not quite matched until the final track: a set of divisions on a ground by John Banister from John Playford’s The Division Violin (1684). Julien-Laferrière is again quite superb: her sound is gorgeously imbued with a sense of searching. The sprightly never tips over into the jaunty; hers is an interpretation well balanced in lightness and intelligence. And this delightful movement is perhaps where the name Ground Floor is most inadequate; it conveys something so prosaic, ubiquitous in solidity and function. But this is music-making of architectural and decorative splendour. Cellist Elena Andreyev is engaging, deft in adapting and steering the flow of narrative energy. Most wonderful are their plucked continuo partners: consistently inventive and subtle in blossom – sometimes barely there, other times very much so (Pierre Gallon’s profusion of imitative semiquavers on the harpsichord is inspiring) – and all together this is something entirely mesmerising.

These two movements of microcosmic wonder are, however, unmet on a larger scale. The album as a whole is out of kilter and feels, strangely, much longer than it actually is. I’m not certain whether the Suite in D minor by Gottfried Finger has much to offer, particularly against the superior compositions of Nicola Matteis. There are some movements steeped in character – the Burlesca from Matteis’s Suite in B flat and the Gavotte from the Suite in A minor are particularly playful, and the Prelude to Matteis’s Suite in D minor is teasing in ephemeral magic – but these are outnumbered by much unexciting playing. Were the speckles of brilliance the standard of the whole, sandwiched by the finery described above, we would have something special indeed.