Melbourne composer Linda Kouvaras introduces herself as “one of the country’s foremost feminist musicologists” in the liner notes for the first in a multi-album project featuring her complete solo instrumental, chamber and vocal works curated by pianist Coady Green. He first met her as a student when she was a senior lecturer at the Melbourne Conservatorium, so this album should be considered definitive.

It is certainly beautifully performed by Green, who is joined by saxophonist Justin Kenealy for Night Pieces: Reflections after COVID-19, five diverse, short pieces written during Melbourne’s multiple lockdowns and for me the highlight of the album.

A friendship from uni days with poet Diane Fahey and lawyer Bronwyn Bartal led to Kouvaras’s 1999 song cycle Art and Life for mezzo-soprano and piano. The three women each contribute two poems, Bartal’s Woman’s Predicament and Party Lines and Deaf Ears being particularly confronting and depressingly relevant, arising from her work with domestic violence victims convicted of killing their abusers. The cycle features the excellent mezzo...