Katherine Jolly is a rather good operatic and recital soprano, teacher – variously at St Louis and Indiana Universities and Oberlin Conservatory – and prizewinner. Her career began in earnest in 2006 and she has performed on stage across the United States, from Amarillo and Houston (with the Grand Opera) in Texas to Florida, Virginia and New York.

One of her specialities is coloratura roles, and in her first solo recital disc, one of the works is specifically designed for coloratura soprano: Katherine Bodor’s climate change-themed cantata Absent an Adjustment (2018). The text was taken from David Wallace-Wells’s controversial 2017 magazine article ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ (the title also of a book by the same author, published this year). Bodor – who aligns with Wallace-Wells’s gloomy views on climate change – composed Absent an Adjustment as ‘a call to action: human ingenuity must triumph’. The accompaniment is from clarinet (bizarrely, Navona’s documentation with the disc, corrected online, holds that Samantha Johnson-Helms is a violinist), violin, viola and double bass. It is a remarkably contemplative work in places, yet with an urgency that grips the attention.

Absent an Adjustment is the shortest work on the disc, flanked by two song-cycles with piano accompaniment (superbly played by Emily Yap Chua) setting lighter, at times aphoristic texts. Evan Williams’s wistful Emily’s House (2011) sets 10 brief poems by Emily Dickinson, rather beautifully too, while Evan Mack’s Preach Sister, Preach (2018) is a sequence of 14 tiny – and often very funny – portraits comprising quotes from some of the West’s most iconic women, from Simone de Beauvoir and Mae West to George Eliot, Daphne du Maurier and Ellen de Generis, with two visits to Lucille Ball. It wears its serious purpose lightly, matched by Katherine Jolly’s near-ideal interpretation. Something of a find, albeit a little short measure, with excellent sound, too.