Like most of the rest of the world, viola player Hiyoli Togawa confronted solitude, anxiety and loneliness during the pandemic shutdown of 2020. Concert opportunities dried up and contact with other musicians disappeared. Isolated from the world, she turned to painting and the music of Bach for company and solace. And then a chance phone call from Finnish composer Kalevi Aho inspired her to commission a remarkable roster of composers to write music inspired by the lockdown.

Those works are interspersed with searching and soulful renditions of the sarabandes from Bach’s Cello Suites on a haunting album entitled ‘Songs of Solitude’. It is an evocative document of the pandemic and its peculiar melancholy and temporal distortion. And a curious thing happens as you listen through it: the Bach movements become progressively more alien and fascinating, and weirdly contemporary. Some of the composers clearly reference Bach, either directly or through textures and polyphony that recall the sarabandes. But somehow Bach seems to return the favour. By the eighth track, I was wondering who was the composer of a strangely angular meditation, only to realise it was the Sarabande from the C minor Cello Suite, played with particular extension of the tempo and line, transformed and mesmerising.

Most of the composers produce music that, not surprisingly, expresses weariness, longing, uncertainty and muted sadness. But they get to those emotions through a wide range of techniques and stylistic twists. Aho adds sung lines to his work, creating lush, almost chorale-like textures. John Powell’s Perfect Time for a Spring Cleaning is the rare work here to use motion and kinetic drive, a series of geometric fiddle riffs over an insistent, driving drone.

All of the works are compelling, and their juxtaposition with Bach is highly effective. This would be a powerful concert programme, a singular journey ideally heard alone and in the dark, which is where so many of us have been for far too long.