Some of us baked, others did DIY, and most of us managed our daily walks. Mezzo Helen Charlston and baritone Michael Craddock – lockdown over-achievers par excellence – commissioned, rehearsed, premiered and recorded an album of entirely new music.

‘Isolation Songbook’, recorded at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall with pianist Alexander Soares in September 2020, is a musical snapshot of a moment, an act of testimony to the strange time-outside-time we’ve all recently shared. An open call for scores attracted some 15 composers, all keen to translate their experiences – of intimacy, loss, introversion, isolation, nature and companionship – into song. The results are varied, from comic miniatures to distilled dramas and contemplative outpourings, but together add up to a recital that’s hard to resist, at once fresh and profoundly familiar.

It’s lovely to see so many young voices here, to hear Craddock and Charlston performing the works of contemporaries Owain Park, Héloïse Werner, Derri Joseph Lewis and Kerensa Briggs. Park’s opener, ‘18th April’, is particularly poignant. Titled for what should have been Charlston and Craddock’s wedding day (cancelled by Covid), it sets words by Charlston herself against a muted bell-peal of a piano accompaniment. Gentle melancholy and affirmation intermingle in voices initially separate but ultimately united.

It’s a contrast to the playful, surreal quality of Werner’s ‘The Orange Vendor’, two voices freed from anchoring piano accompaniment chasing and echoing in drifting portamentos – a musical picking-over of the fragmented minutiae of lockdown life. Also striking is Stephen Bick’s Milton setting ‘On His Blindness’, its elegiac, Tallis-infused lyricism a showcase for the stern beauty of Charlston’s mezzo and her legato phrasing.

Craddock has fun with Matthew JC Ward’s aphoristic Concerning Cows, and both rise to the operatic challenge of Ben Rowarth’s ‘The King’s Breakfast’ with its tangle of characters, accents, spoken and sung dialogue. Soares is a sensitive accompanist throughout.