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A solo violin and viola lament in ghostly harmonics, sounds skimming and slipping glassily off one another. Christ’s sinews snap in the explosive pizzicato of two double basses, before a vibraphone takes over: counterpoint suspended like drops of blood in a bowl of water, harmony smudging into cloudy new shapes. It’s Pergolesi – his famous Stabat Mater – as only Lera Auerbach could hear it, her 2005 Sogno di Stabat Mater a concert-opener that’s O/Modernt in microcosm.

Violinist Hugo Ticciati’s flexible Stockholm-based chamber ensemble (whose name translates to “Un/Modern”) has spent well over a decade expanding our ears and minds, making the old new and the new old through unexpected musical juxtapositions, arrangements and dialogues.

Over the past six months and a three-concert residency at the Wigmore Hall, they’ve roamed from Hildegard of Bingen to Lennon and McCartney (via Ligeti, Brahms and Arvo Pärt): intense musical conversations all, propelled by the energy of playing that’s evangelical in its zeal.

But when the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony (freighted not only with the composer’s own undeclared passion for his beloved Alma, but with all the fatal yearning of Visconti’s Death in Venice) is your emotional relief and release, you may have overloaded a recital too concentrated, too unremitting for sustained listening.

Auerbach’s crucifixion was answered by the musical wake of Osvaldo Golijov’s The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind (1994). A clarinet concerto by any other name, with soloist Christoffer Sundqvist a hypnotic cantor at the centre of the ensemble, now chattering in tongues, now driving the strings in an urgent, convulsive dance. A history of Judaism in three movements, joy and suffering are inextricably entangled in music that’s rarely still, always shredding and reinventing itself. O/Modernt were a responsive congregation; Ticciati and Lundqvist locked in trance-like union.

If those were the fires in this “Fires of Love” programme, the love was supplied by Mahler (the Adagietto’s passionate surges lacking the swell of a full symphonic string section) and Janáček’s String Quartet No 2 “Intimate Letters”. Scaled up for string orchestra by Ticciati himself, this musical love letter was a delight: big and batteringly rough. If you weren’t bruised and gasping by the end of this concert, you weren’t listening hard enough.