The latest release from tenor Nicholas Phan features his regular collaborator, the outstanding pianist Myra Huang, and The Jasper Quartet in world premiere recordings of works by Vivian Fung and Patrick Castillo alongside songs by Schubert, Ives, and Vaughan Williams. Timed to coincide with World Earth Day, the program explores humanity’s interaction with nature. 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 which persist beyond human joy and grief alike. In Ives’s Housatonic at Stockbridge, memories, hymns, and the river blend together into a shimmering meditation on transcendence. Patrick Castillo’s Skyline Palimpsest is an homage to New York City that reflects on how nature’s effects may shape the future of the metropolis. The title track by Canadian-born composer Vivian Fung, pairs 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.