New York-based Australian soprano Jane Sheldon posts about Nature, her latest album, recorded with pianist Nicole Panizza and featuring several works by Australian composers. Nature has been nominated for Best Independent Classical Album of 2014 in the AIR Awards.

..although at first they did no more than sing the music they had sung at home, they increasingly came to sing it in ways that were changed by the wilderness.
(Wilfrid Mellers: Music in a New Found Land)

The Australian landscape is known for its harshness, its inhospitable aridity, its extremes. But one thing about the climate in much of the country that’s really very gentle is the turning of the seasons from one into another. Mother Nature’s hand is very sure on the dial, the sweltering summer heat just ebbs away, and then one day it’s 3 or 4 degrees cooler and we all recognise we’re being ushered into autumn.

I’m writing this from New York, where I now live, and where I cannot seem to get used to the shock of seasonal change. Here, it’s as if at some point in September, when the air conditioners are groaning away,...