Lamenting Earth, the latest release from Grammy Award-winning tenor Nicholas Phan, in collaboration with The Jasper Quartet and his long-time performing partner pianist Myra Huang, explores humanity’s interaction with nature as expressed through composers of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

Franz Schubert’s songs evoke images of water, stillness, and solitude as mirrors of human emotion. Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge, drawing on A.E. Housman’s poetry, places the individual within vast cycles of time and landscape – hills, wind, and earth – which persist beyond human joy and grief alike. Ives’s Housatonic at Stockbridge memories, hymns, and the river blend together into a shimmering meditation on transcendence, where nature becomes a spiritual threshold rather than a backdrop.

21st-century responses include Patrick Castillo’s Skyline Palimpsest, an homage to New York City, once his hometown, that reflects on how nature’s effects may shape the future of the metropolis. The title track by Canadian-born composer Vivian Fung, pairs American writer Claire Wahmanholm’s poem “O” – which has been described as a lament, an elegy, and a clarion call to action – with Gen Z-ers urgent written responses to climate change. Nicholas Phan’s burnished tone and passion for vocal chamber music bring vivid beauty to the range of repertoire that shares a central theme.

Lamenting Earth is released to coincide with World Earth Day.