• From the Ground Up (Signum Classics) is the witty title of an imaginative album by the British violinist Hugo Ticciati, with help from Chilean-Swedish mezzo-soprano Luciana Mancini, New York rapper Baba Israel, the British actor Samuel West and various musicians – the O/Modernt chamber orchestra – playing anything from theorbo to electric guitar to percussion, with drones, throat singing and improvisations. The disc’s capacious theme is the ground bass (in which a melodic pattern recurs in the bass part) through musical history, from early Spanish chaconnes, or chacona, to Purcell (Dido’s Lament Remix) to Bach’s Partita in D minor for Solo Violin, BWV 1004.
The ensemble’s Swedish name means Un/Modern, encouraging a refreshing exchange of past and present styles. It works, helped by injections of new sounds from composers Dušan Bogdanović and Johannes Marmén, all beautifully played.
• You’d be forgiven for scratching your head at the name Chiara Margarita Cozzolani (1602-c77). The music of the Italian Benedictine sister, like that of other cloistered nuns of the period, has remained virtually unknown. She was the abbess of a thriving monastery in Milan, yet managed to have four volumes of her sacred music published.
Emiliano Gonzalez Toro and his ensemble I Gemelli, a group specialising in 17th-century music, have reconstructed Cozzolani’s Vespers (Naïve) based on the printed edition of 1650. This collection of psalm settings and motets displays Cozzolani’s gift for complexity, sensuality and variety, sometimes using two choirs (soprano, alto, tenor, bass), or solo voices, and often reminiscent of Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610. There’s also a ciaccona ground bass at the end of the delicate O quam bonus es.
• Taking the bottom line question a step further, in an old episode of Radio 3’s The Listening Service (BBC Sounds) Tom Service asks: “Why are we all addicted to bass?” From baroque vocal to orchestral to dubstep to R&B, the answers are stranger than you’d think.
