As with many other Australian composers, the music of Linda Kouvaras (b. 1960) has a strong sense of space, expressed in lyrical, elegiac melodic lines that soar over freewheeling piano textures. The two substantial works on this second Toccata Classics album of her music demonstrate her concern that her compositions engage with the outside world: the epic Herring Island Piano Sonata adds narrator and recorded sound – not least of local birds – to the piano to bring alive the Indigenous history of a small hidden paradise in downtown Melbourne, and the poems set in Winter Came Early reveal a mother and daughter coming to terms with a fatal diagnosis of cancer.