This might be the most serene apocalypse you’ll hear. In ‘Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene’, the soprano Renée Fleming reflects on the climate crisis, and the urgent threat to the natural world and, implicitly, to our existence. The ‘Anthropocene’ itself is the term some scientists use for today’s geological epoch, the era in which mankind has put its possibly fatal stamp on the environment.

Anyway, you can breathe: the message may be bleak but the album doesn’t sound remotely as awful. ‘We know we are doomed, done for, damned’, Fleming sings in one of the two new songs she commissioned for the project, Kevin Puts’s ‘Evening’, with words by Dorianne Laux, but the dreamy parlando setting is pure balm on the wounds. Like a reliable family tailor, Puts dresses Fleming’s still peachy voice with shrewd discretion.

There are two more contemporary American works on this ‘lockdown’ recital (it was recorded this past spring in Philadelphia with Yannick Nézet-Séguin on the piano). In ‘Endless Space’ by Nico Muhly, also commissioned for the album, the composer does better than Puts at both providing rapturous music to showcase Fleming’s radiant tone and also dealing imaginatively with her cerebral theme. His chosen texts span 21st-century nervousness about the environmental crisis (‘I try to talk about it, and it comes out as clichés’, says a journalist in The Atlantic) and verses from the visionary 17th-century Anglican cleric Thomas Traherne, ethereally set by Muhly and given magical lift-off by Fleming. The 2017 song that concludes the album perhaps also defines it: Caroline Shaw’s ‘Aurora Borealis’, its starry beauty artful and elusive, finishing in wordless vocalise. Perhaps delicate nature is best captured when a voice no longer speaks.

Around these fresh numbers come lieder and mélodies from Fauré, Hahn, Liszt and Grieg, all inspired by the natural world, although this idea is very broadly treated, and a poor booklet note offers almost no useful commentary on their selection (nor even the dates when the songs were composed or premiered). Indulged by Nézet-Séguin – his tone somewhat strident in a boxy recording – Fleming sometimes lays the sentiment on thickly, and there’s a cloying aftertaste to the lovely reveries of Hahn’s ‘L’enamourée’ or Grieg’s ‘Zur Rosenzeit’.

The overall lustre of Fleming’s shiveringly lovely voice, from its silvery high notes to bitter-chocolate chest register, however, is significant compensation. Fleming hits gorgeous melancholy in two Verlaine settings by Fauré, ‘Prison’ and ‘En sourdine’, and finds the darkly seductive heart of Liszt’s transporting Goethe setting, ‘Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’, from which Nézet-Séguin draws mysterious echoes of Wagner’s Parsifal: mysterious because Liszt wrote those prayerful chords decades before his future son-in-law wrote his grail opera.