As society finally takes its first cautious steps towards a brave new post-pandemic world, more and more musicians are sharing their responses to a time marked by lockdowns, limited contacts and opportunities, and limited work.

Mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke’s ‘How do I find you’ (Pentatone download, 3/22) foregrounded the diverse and wide-ranging nature of composers’ reactions and responses during this time. Julie Cooper’s ‘Continuum’ takes a different approach by capturing the early months of the pandemic as a series of freeze-framed moments. The award-winning film composer recalls how the stillness and silence of the first lockdown, with its empty streets and skies, served to magnify the sounds of nature, especially birdsong.

Contemplation Suite emerged out of these thoughts and reflections. Its four movements track the phases of a day, from the fragile, songlike ‘Dawn’, with its opening triadic iterations evoking Arvo Pärt, to the folk-like ‘Dream’, which sets lines from a Christina Rossetti poem. The bustling, film soundtrack-friendly second movement ‘Day’ gives way to darker thoughts in ‘Dusk’, the latter containing impassioned interjections on solo violin by Elena Urioste alongside luminously floating lines from soprano Grace Davidson.

The title-track itself, featuring violinist Clio Gould and The Oculus Ensemble conducted by Jessica Cottis, was inspired by a powerful monologue about the pandemic by actress and longtime friend Adjoa Andoh, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme in January 2021. Andoh reworked the text into a life-affirming poem, which was then recorded over Cooper’s music. It is heard alongside looping musical lines and folding figures, which add depth and direction to the narrative, quickening its rhythms to the pulse and nuance of the actress’s animated voice. Other highlights include Darkness and Light, full of shifting Philip Glass-like harmonies and oscillations, supported once more by Davidson’s ethereal voice (which is even more haunting in The Cold Earth Slept Below) and the intense lyricism of Gould’s violin, alongside Anthony Pike on clarinet and Justin Pearson on cello.

‘Continuum’ may gravitate too closely to the mainstream for some readers’ tastes but one is constantly reminded in Cooper’s expressively honed music of its power to comfort and inspire in difficult times, echoing WB Yeats’s words: ‘We sing amid our uncertainty.’