Baseball, Bach, a disused railway line and the misuse of music in Iraqi prisons might be unexpected inspirations behind the work of a composer who is an Oxford professor by day. But the piano music of Martyn Harry - born in Crawley, West Sussex, in 1964 - proves to be a wild, kaleidoscopic mix of just such unlikely influences: Satie, Sorabji, American minimalism, Prokofiev, Silvestrov and more, all intended to exercise the technique of his good friend, the fireball pianist Jonathan Powell, whose early death in December 2025 shocked the musical world. There is a gleeful, almost manic quality to much of this music that found a counterpart in the unflagging energy of Powell's playing. A song-cycle setting six early Anna Akhmatova poems likewise taps into the tension she found in intimacy, releasing a surprising degree of passion.

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 (22 April 2026).