While many musicians experienced meltdown during lockdown (for understandable reasons, of course), others found creative and artistic freedom in the restrictions imposed upon them, completing projects that were long overdue or developing entirely new ones. Award-winning singer Sasha Cooke took the latter route during the dark days of the first wave of the pandemic in 2020 by inviting 17 composers (and, in many cases, living poets) to reflect on their personal thoughts and feelings in song form. The results are heard on ‘How do I find you’.

This fascinating collection covers a wide range of experiences and styles which draw on folk, jazz, musical theatre, minimalism and atonality, from messages of hope contained in the opening and closing songs, by Caroline Shaw and Jimmy López Bellido respectively, to the trials and tribulations of domestic life in Andrew Marshall’s witty ‘(A Bad Case of) Kids’. Belligerent disapproval and righteous indignation spiral out of control in Frances Pollock’s chaotic ‘#MasksUsedToBeFun’, while revealing moments suddenly appear in the slow unfolding passage of time in John Glover’s ‘Spider’ and Christopher Cerrone’s ‘Everything Will Be Okay’.

Other songs focus on important news events that occurred during Covid, such as the murder of George Floyd (Kamala Sankaram’s evocative setting of Mark Campbell’s poem ‘Listen’), the continuing plight of immigrants (Huang Ruo’s ‘The Work of Angels’), a gunman in a primary school (Joel Thompson and Gene Scheer’s ‘Still Waiting’) or California wildfires (Lembit Beecher and Liza Balkan’s ‘After the Fires’). Nico Muhly’s poignantly expressive ‘Inward Things’ draws on the words of the 17th-century English poet Thomas Traherne, which eerily anticipate the events of 2020 by several hundred years: ‘For Sin and Death / Are most infused by accursed Breath / That, flowing from corrupted Intrails, bear / Those hidden Plagues which Souls may justly fear.’

Mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke tells these stories as if she had experienced them herself, imparting subtle yet significant changes of mood and character for each song. Accompanist Kirill Kuzmin provides excellent support throughout. It is still too soon to grasp the full implications and legacy of the pandemic but these short aural diaries provide a fascinating glimpse into the minds of creative artists during difficult times, while offering powerful testimony of what it was like to be there, at that time, in the middle of it all.