At the moment, stuck in the lockdown with no foreseeable end, i’m experiencing (like, i imagine, many people) good days and bad days – the former when my mind is focused and energised, the latter when it feels flat and enervated. It’s a situation that’s made a chamber work i heard last October take on a richer meaning. Together, alone by Yfat Soul Zisso is a piece that very obviously channels disquiet, discomfort and pain, drawing on the sensation of feeling isolated even when surrounded by others. It’s a sense of dislocation and separation that i recognise myself, one that has taken on extra dimensions in the current climate when the word “social” can hardly be uttered without being followed by “distance”.

The piece has a Skempton-like simplicity – by which i mean it’s deceptive, not actually simple at all. That being said, Zisso’s music is also very clear and immediate. Initially, we hear an F-sharp minor chord sequence; it’s stable, yet at the same time it’s obviously fragile, sounding desperately elegiac. Over time that stability is revealed to be, depending on your perspective, either precarious or downright non-existent. Two unities come undone: the players no longer operate as a group, by turns breaking off independently, in the process thinning out the chords and questioning the group’s actions; and the harmonic integrity of those chords is made oblique by an increasing intrusion of microtones. The result is a blurred semblance of something identifiable, like trying to see clearly through eyes filled with tears. There’s an implied frustration underpinning and/or arising from this, made plain in the agonising sequence of repeated chords that ends the piece, hammer blows that just feel completely numb. Read more