Is it too soon to call a work ‘classic Crane’? Well, I’m going to go ahead and say that Natural World for soprano and piano/sampler is classic Crane. Commissioned by Juliet Fraser, the Oxford Lieder Festival and Musica Sacra Maastricht, Natural World brings together the ecstatic stillness of nature and the mundane ordinariness of reading a science article. At almost an hour in length, it is Crane’s longest concert piece to date, and last year it won the Small Chamber Ivor Novello Award.

Natural World draws on the American marine biologist Rachel Carson and, Crane says, ‘continues my preoccupation with the poetic qualities of factual, list-based texts’. The voice, in repeated tonally inflected phrases, sings about ecological life in strings of neutral terminology (‘winter visitor … great northern diver … dead leaves … grain, grass and other vegetation …’). After a while the soprano drops semantics altogether and, in counterpoint with the piano, sings wordless glissandos and melismatic-style flourishes. The piano style is spare, characterised by Satie-style I/IV triads, pentatonicism, and Feldmanesque repetition and variation. In the fermatas between phrases, sampled birdsong starts appearing. In the last part, ‘Seascape’, which features maritime sounds, Fraser is accompanied by sustained Casio keyboard tones, the work eventually ending on a bright sixth chord.

But description only goes so far here. If I were pushed further, I might say that this album evokes the humdrum delirium of a person dozing in a deckchair in their garden on a summer afternoon, a broadsheet over their chest, the sound of birdsong mixing in their dreaming mind with a half-read newspaper article on climate change, English whimsy radiating in light rays through cloud cover. At least, that’s how it sounds to me. Perhaps the highest compliment I can pay the album is that it’s art, it’s challenging, it’s distinctive and it really does politely ask you, dozing in your deckchair, to engage with and try to make sense of it.