New York Festival Of Song to Present 16th Annual NYFOS Next Festival

New York Festival of Song will kick off its 2025-2026 season with the 16th annual NYFOS Next Festival on Sunday, October 5, 2025 at 3:00 p.m. at The Theater at 150 W 17. The festival, curated by Nathaniel LaNasa, features a trio of concerts celebrating new song interspersed throughout the season.

"I've been on the hunt for songs that pull at loose threads, and songs that embrace bewilderment," shares curator Nathaniel LaNasa. "What a delight it has been to get to know these composers' diverse ways of bridging distance with sound. I'm especially excited to welcome this stellar cast of singers, each of whom can create a whole world in just one phrase. All three programs have at least one work written expressly for the singer performing it, and our season culminates in the presentation of our three Luna Lab premieres, the first commissioning project that I've had the opportunity to co-create with NYFOS."

The first NYFOS Next concert is an afternoon in thrall to uncrossable distances, taking its name from Christopher Trapani's lushly resonant song cycle on prose by Rebecca Solnit, The color of where you can never go. Commissioned through the Barlow Prize and performed by soprano Sharon Harms in her NYFOS debut, the songs give voice to what Solnit describes as "that melancholy wonder that is the blue of distance."

The program also includes Amelia Brey's indignant Eurydice, based on an unfinished 1916 poem by H.D., and Sofia Rocha's aching The River, both exploring the pain of impossible returns. Eve Beglarian's weightless Dream Amid Bed-woods offers a warning not to give in to the seductions of a lushly described "orchard dormitory," while her meditation Peace invites stillness even amid the knowledge of "another valley."

Vast distances between intimates animates Herschel Garfein's A Tuesday Spot and Shawn Chang's Blue, a humorous confessional that traverses the wastelands and dead ends of social media. Soprano Emily Finke also makes her NYFOS debut, and is joined by baritone Gregory Feldmann and mezzo-soprano Devony Smith.

"An art song recital is the last place remaining for an audience to hear an unamplified singer in an intimate setting; as such, it always has a whiff of the 19th century about it," said CadenzaNYC in a recent review. "But NYFOS Next, the venerable New York Festival of Song's new music series, showed...that the ancient form is alive and very much kicking in the hands of the current generation of practitioners."

The NYFOS Next series continues with The Many Worlds Interpretation, a program that takes playful aim at tellings and retellings of our self-narratives on Sunday, November 16, 2025 at 3:00 p.m. Composer and pianist Michael Stephen Brown performs his own Love's Lives Lost together with soprano Susanna Phillips for the work's New York premiere; plus Kimberly Osberg's wistful You, Us, Me mourns an "us" that never had room for "me," and Sarah Gibson's Breath'd back again remixes poems of Thomas Moore to unmoor stories of our own anguish in "endless space."

In June 2026, NYFOS Next's latest collaboration presents a meditation on possibility and impossibility in The Same River Twice, featuring three world premieres of new songs by Luna Composition Lab alumni Elisa Johnson, Alicia Erlandson, and Devon Lee, commissioned by NYFOS and celebrating the tenth anniversary of Luna Lab's founding. Soprano Jennifer Zetlan and mezzo-soprano Kelly Guerra will work closely with these young composers on works written for their voices, and the program will be filled out by selections from Luna Lab's roster of superstar mentors.

All NYFOS programming is funded, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

The NYFOS Mainstage and the NYFOS Next series are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Concert Information:

NYFOS Next: The color of where you can never go

Sunday, October 5, 2025 at 3:00 p.m.
The Theater at 150 W 17 | 150 W 17th St | New York, NY 10011
Tickets: Single tickets on sale September 1, 2025
Link: https://nyfos.org/nyfos-next/

Program:
Christopher Trapani - The Color of Where You Can Never Go
Amelia Brey - Eurydice
Eve Beglarian - Dream Amid Bed-woods
Herschel Garfein - A Tuesday Spot
Eve Beglarian - Peace (Pascal)
Gabriel Kahane - 8980
Shawn Chang - Blue
Sofia Rocha - The River

Artists:
Sharon Harms, soprano
Emily Finke, soprano
Devony Smith, mezzo-soprano
Gregory Feldmann, baritone
Nathaniel LaNasa, pianist

NYFOS Next: The Many Worlds Interpretation

Sunday, November 16, 2025 at 3:00 p.m.
The Theater at 150 W 17 | 150 W 17th St | New York, NY 10011
Tickets: Single tickets on sale September 1, 2025
Link: https://nyfos.org/nyfos-next/

Program:
Michael Stephen Brown - Love's Lives Lost
Kimberly Osberg - You, Us, Me

Artists:
Susanna Phillips, soprano
Michael Stephen Brown, piano
Nathaniel LaNasa, pianist
Additional Artists TBA

NYFOS Next: The Same River Twice

June 2026
The Theater at 150 W 17 | 150 W 17th St | New York, NY 10011
Tickets: Single tickets on sale September 1, 2025
Link: https://nyfos.org/nyfos-next/

Program:
Three premieres of new songs by Luna Composition Lab fellows commissioned by NYFOS, alongside songs by Luna alums and mentors.