GRAMMY AWARD-WINNING TENOR NICHOLAS PHAN, PIANIST MYRA HUANG, AND THE JASPER STRING QUARTET RELEASE LAMENTING EARTH ON AVIE RECORDS — APRIL 17, 2026
New album explores humanity's evolving relationship with the natural world, featuring world premiere recordings of works by Vivian Fung and Patrick Castillo alongside songs by Schubert, Ives, and Vaughan Williams
Grammy Award-winning tenor Nicholas Phan, Grammy-nominated pianist Myra Huang, and the prizewinning Jasper String Quartet release Lamenting Earth on April 17, 2026 via Avie Records, in advance of Earth Day on April 22. The album traces humanity's continually evolving relationship with the environment through a richly layered musical lens, featuring world premiere recordings of works by composers Vivian Fung and Patrick Castillo alongside songs by Franz Schubert, Charles Ives, and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
"Over the centuries, humankind's relationship with nature has ping-ponged between two ideas: that we are a part of it, and that we are separate from it," says Phan. "In this oscillating narrative, we have at times believed that we can subjugate and control nature, and at others sought 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 history, juxtaposing works shaped by Romanticism and Transcendentalism with contemporary responses to humanity's environmental crisis."
A New Cycle at the Album's Heart
The album takes its title from Vivian Fung's new song cycle for tenor and piano quintet, Lamenting Earth, which the ensemble premiered in May 2024. Born out of Phan's artist residency at the Kaufman Music Center during the 2023–24 season, the cycle pairs musical settings of climate-change poetry written by high school students of Kaufman's Special Music School with a setting of Claire Wahmanholm's award-winning poem O, which traces the evolving vocabulary of climate change through words beginning with that single letter.
"I was captivated by Claire Wahmanholm's poem O and immediately knew it needed to sit at the center of what I began to envision as a song cycle," says Fung. "As a parent, I keenly feel the weight carried by younger generations, who often lack meaningful outlets to express their feelings about our changing climate, this legacy they will inherit from us. Thinking about my own child in the context of this work, it felt important to give young people a voice in this dialogue. Lamenting Earth is, in part, an attempt to listen."
Castillo and the Classical Repertoire
Patrick Castillo's Skyline Palimpsest for string quartet offers a second contemporary perspective, meditating on the indifference of place to human presence and on a near future in which cities like New York will be reclaimed by rising seas. "When leaving, and when revisiting, the sites of our lives' experience, we confront the sobering reality that life goes on without us," says Castillo. "An especially disquieting way in which home changes: before long, New York City, like many other homes to millions of other people, will be underwater."
Alongside these two premieres, the album features songs by Franz Schubert and Charles Ives, in which nature serves as both companion and teacher, and Ralph Vaughan Williams's On Wenlock Edge — where hills, wind, and earth are cast as forces that outlast human joy and grief alike.
A Milestone for Phan and Huang
Lamenting Earth marks Nicholas Phan's 10th album with Avie Records, a 15-year relationship that has produced two Grammy-nominated albums and earned multiple placements on the year-end best-of lists of many publications including the New York Times, New Yorker, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and Time Out NY. The album is also Myra Huang's 7th release with the label. Their 2017 collaboration Gods & Monsters made Phan the first singer of Asian descent to be nominated in the Grammy's Best Classical Solo Vocal Album category — a category the Recording Academy has awarded since 1959.