LAMENTING EARTH
with Myra Huang, piano
Jasper String Quartet
Avie Records
ABOUT THE ALBUM
Throughout the history of humanity, we have ping-ponged between two ideas about our relationship with nature: that we are a part of it, and that we are separate from it. In this oscillating narrative, we have also engaged in what can feel like a multi-generational struggle with the natural world, at times believing we can subjugate and control it, and at others seeking to understand its rhythms and harmonies in order to live within its bounds and benefit from its gifts.
This album traces several moments in that evolving relationship, juxtaposing works shaped by Romanticism and Transcendentalism with contemporary responses to humanity’s environmental crisis. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nature was often understood as mysterious, sublime, and morally instructive. A place where human beings could recognize their smallness, reflect on their inner lives, and find refuge from an increasingly industrialized world. The music and poetry of that era stand in sharp contrast to our present moment, in which humanity’s confidence in its power to master the environment has revealed itself as dangerously misplaced. The fragile balance we once observed has been disrupted, with consequences that are no longer abstract or distant.
The songs of Franz Schubert, Charles Ives, and Ralph Vaughan Williams on this recording inhabit a world in which nature remains a powerful interlocutor. Schubert’s songs evoke water, stillness, and solitude as mirrors of human feeling—nature as both companion and teacher. Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge, drawing on A. E. Housman’s poetry, places the individual within vast cycles of time and landscape, where hills, wind, and earth outlast human joy and grief alike. Ives’s Housatonic at Stockbridge blurs memory, hymn, and river into a shimmering meditation on transcendence, where nature becomes a spiritual threshold rather than a backdrop.
Set alongside these works are two contemporary pieces that reflect a profound shift in perspective. Patrick Castillo’s Skyline Palimpsest emerges from the experience of displacement and return, approaching the Manhattan skyline from afar, witnessing constant erasure and rebuilding, and recognizing how places we call “home” change without regard for us. Beneath its meditation on memory and belonging lies an unsettling truth: cities like New York face an uncertain future in a warming world.
Vivian Fung’s Lamenting Earth confronts that urgency directly. Anchored by Claire Wahmanholm’s poem O and expanded through the voices of high-school students responding to climate change, the cycle foregrounds youth perspectives often left unheard. Their words transform lament into testimony, asking not only to be heard, but to be taken seriously.
Taken together, these works chart a progression: from communion with nature, to contemplation of its power, to a reckoning with our impact upon it. This album is not an argument so much as an invitation to listen closely, to notice what has changed, and to consider what kind of relationship with the natural world we hope to leave behind.
– Nicholas Phan
CRITICAL ACCLAIM
GRAMOPHONE
“As discographies of mid-career artists go, Nicholas Phan’s is impressively wide-ranging…This latest album from the American tenor and his regular collaborator pianist Myra Huang – plus contributions from the Jasper String Quartet – is another themed offering: music that Phan suggests concerns humanity’s ‘multi-generational struggle with the natural world’.It’s an intriguing conceit, aiming to connect Romantic and Transcendentalist attitudes to the environment and our own contemporary sense of crisis. In this context, Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge appears unusually avant-garde – closer to Debussy than cosy English pastoral. The opening of ‘Bredon Hill’ sounds wonderfully strange, the Jasper Quartet playing without vibrato, Huang’s touch ever sensitive. Phan himself is also at his best in the more tentative, intimate moments that showcase his lean, luminous tenor…In Ives’s ‘The Housatonic at Stockbridge’, Huang conjures a remarkable range of piano sounds: eery music-box tinkling up top, her bass periodically boasting industrial heft. Patrick Castillo’s Skyline Palimpsest for string quartet offers an equivalent array of beguiling timbres, lovingly captured in this recording: shivers of trills and slides, millpond-smooth legato, pizzicatos that ricochet and carefully coordinated vibrato.Vivian Fung’s Lamenting Earth was premiered by Phan, Huang and the Jasper String Quartet in 2024. Placed as the final work on this album, Fung’s sometimes Britten-ish vocal writing – sung resolutely in that spirit here – does indeed appear convincingly as part of the same tradition of richly ambivalent nature-music as Vaughan Williams and Ives. Phan’s diction is crystalline and compelling amid instrumental fidgeting, nasty lurches through bow lengths and thrillingly dark‑toned passages on the piano.”
CULTURAL ATTACHÉ
“Tenor Phan, pianist Huang and Jasper String Quartet have assembled a compelling program from these five composer’s works.Anytime Vaughan Williams’ music is performed, I take notice. I believe he is an underrated composer and Phan’s singing of On Wenlock Edge makes another serious argument for reconsideration of his work…Fung’s Lamenting Earth had its world premiere with Phan in 2024. She set high school students’ climate-change poetry to music and the result is mesmerizing. The third of the four movements sets Claire Wahmanholm’s poem O. to music.This 62-minute album would make a great concert. I hope Phan, Huang and Jasper String Quartet take it on the road.”
CLASSICAL VOICE NORTH AMERICA
“Fung’s initial inspiration — and the core of the libretto — was Claire Wahmanholm’s poem “O,” using words such as “osprey,” “ocean,” and “ozone” to speak poetically about the deteriorating climate. Wahmanholm also helped shape the student contributions. The result is a text of surprising range and shocking twists: The beautiful “natural” world as first described is revealed to be an artificial replacement; we find ourselves in a harsh, barren reality that humanity could have prevented…The Jasper String Quartet and pianist Myra Huang provide an illusory lushness reminiscent of Britten in the opening movement, “November Blooming,” with musical hints of trouble on words like “ominous.” This contrasts with the insect-like, threatening scurry of “Lament,” revealing the environmental truth. “O” follows, growing slowly upward from the bottom of the performers’ registers, textured with fast string crossings and burbling piano left hand.
Phan’s voice…is always expressive, committed to the poetry, and integrated with the instrumental parts. The final movement, “Vast, Green,” has a through line of quiet sorrow, admiring nature while also grieving for it...The album opens with three lieder by Schubert for voice and piano. “Wandrers Nachtlied II,” sets a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; the dark colors of Huang’s accompanying chords blend gloriously with Phan’s gentle delivery. Franz von Bruchmann wrote the text for “Am See”; Schubert’s writing and Phan’s performance capture the wonder of the night sky with short, breathless phrases…Rather than a poet’s admiration of nature, Vaughan Williams’ six-movement song cycle On Wenlock Edge, using texts by A.E. Housman, focuses on human interaction with nature as workers on the land. “Is my team ploughing?” stands out for both Phan’s finely sculpted lines and the Jasper and Huang’s tender playing…”
ALLMUSIC
“Tenor Nicholas Phan joins pianist Myra Huang and the prizewinning Jasper String Quartet in a program tracing humanity's continually evolving relationship with the natural environment across centuries through a carefully curated repertoire spanning Romantic lieder, 20th century songs, and contemporary works…The three selected Schubert songs demonstrate Phan's control of intimate vocal expression and his sensitivity to textual meaning. His burnished tone suits the Romantic-era material while permitting genuine vulnerability in moments demanding introspection……Vivian Fung's Lamenting Earth constitutes the album's centerpiece. The four-movement cycle pairs poet Claire Wahmanholm's prize-winning poem O with urgent climate-focused responses from high school students. Rather than a monolithic artistic statement, the work foregrounds youth perspectives and contemporary urgency. Wahmanholm's poem, described as a lament, an elegy, and a clarion call simultaneously, receives musical treatment emphasizing both emotional weight and testimonial power. The younger voices transform potential despair into testimony demanding serious consideration. Huang demonstrates complete technical and interpretive mastery across demanding piano writing spanning multiple centuries and compositional styles. The Jasper String Quartet executes both traditional accompaniment and contemporary chamber writing with impressive security and expressive engagement. This album succeeds as both an artistic achievement and a genuine invitation to listen carefully to the environmental crisis. The ensemble demonstrates that art song tradition remains a vital medium for addressing contemporary urgency.”
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
“…the string quartet [Skyline Palimpsest ]is given a committed reading by the Jaspers…there’s no doubting the impassioned fervour with which Phan and his team tackle Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge. It’s fascinating to hear an American perspective probing Vaughan Williams’s very English take on Housman’s verse …”
INFODAD
“…Nicholas Phan’s voice is beautifully expressive in the three Schubert songs, whose wistful lyricism shines through with warmth and emotional commitment. The even greater emotional range of Vaughan Williams’ settings of A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad in On Wenlock Edge gives Phan plenty of scope for emoting, and he very clearly conveys the skillful ways in which Vaughan Williams accentuates Housman’s placing of human feelings and emotions both within grand natural settings and outside of them. Political intentionality aside, this is a highly sensitive and thoughtful interpretation of the work. Ives’ The Housatonic at Stockbridge, arranged by him for voice and piano after first being used as the third of his Three Places in New England, contrasts appealingly and very effectively with On Wenlock Edge, being mostly quieter and more strongly philosophical. Here Phan melds his voice with the complexities of the piano part to very fine effect, and Myra Huang’s accompaniment is very much to the point – as indeed it is throughout this recording…”