THIS NOW NAKED LIFE to Make Debut at New York Festival of Song

The New York Festival of Song (NYFOS) will present a new original program, This Now Naked Life, on Sunday, November 15, 2026, at 3:00pm at The Theater at 150 W 17th Street. Part of the NYFOS Next series, curated by pianist Nathaniel LaNasa to spotlight new contemporary song and rising composers, the program explores the sources of wonderment that both empower and humble us, and that help define what it means to be human. LaNasa is joined by mezzo-soprano Shannon Keegan, tenor Paul Appleby, and Brooklyn-based composer/vocalist leiken in works by Daniel Pesca, Thomas Kotcheff, Elise Arancio, and Joel Balzun, alongside the World Premiere of selections from leiken's I Have Been the Blue Salmon, from their forthcoming evening-length work Ars Moriendi.

In songs about our machines, our planet, and our finitude, the program considers how humanity's reach exceeds its grasp. Appleby sings Pesca's Terra Incognita, which imagines four stages in the process of lunar exploration, as well as Balzun's Anglin Lake. Works by Kotcheff and Arancio featuring Keegan take an in-depth look at natural processes of wonder closer to home, and leiken's I Have Been the Blue Salmon proposes a quietly soulful relationship with limitation.

'These songs swing from the moon landing, with all its excitement, to fragrant, wild sweetgrass and the collective memories it evokes,' says NYFOS Next curator Nathaniel LaNasa. 'As the world seems to move ever faster, I wanted to create a program celebrating my conflicting impulses to explore and to stay rooted in one place.'

This Now Naked Life is the second of three NYFOS Next programs this season. On Sunday, September 27, 2026, NYFOS Next opened its season with A Perfect Rose: Dorothy Parker Songs. Celebrating the 20th-century poet famed for her caustic wit, the program featured the World Premieres of four new 'Parker Songs' by Jeremy Beck. The series concludes with If We Can Love in This Lifetime on Sunday, May 23, 2027, at 3:00pm at The Theater at 150 W 17th Street.

The NYFOS Next series is funded in part by a grant from The Aaron Copland Fund for Music; by the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Program Information

Sunday, November 15, 2026 at 3:00pm
This Now Naked Life (NYFOS Next)
The Theater at 150 W 17th Street | New York, NY
Link: nyfos.org/nyfos-next

Program:
Daniel Pesca – Terra Incognita
Elise Arancio – Don't Talk to Me
Thomas Kotcheff – Both, and More
Joel Balzun – Anglin Lake
leiken – Selections from I Have Been the Blue Salmon, from Ars Moriendi [World Premiere]

Shannon Keegan, mezzo-soprano
Paul Appleby, tenor
leiken, vocalist
Nathaniel LaNasa, piano

Upcoming NYFOS Programs

Monday, December 7, 2026 at 8:00pm
A Goyishe Christmas to You!
The Theater at 150 W 17th Street | New York, NY
Link: nyfos.org/goyishe-christmas
Also available via livestream

Featuring:
Lauren Worsham, soprano
Donna Breitzer, mezzo-soprano
Rebecca Jo Loeb, mezzo-soprano
Alex Mansoori, tenor
Joshua Jeremiah, baritone
Joshua Breitzer, cantor
Alan R. Kay, clarinet
Steven Blier, host and pianist

Wednesday, January 13, 2027 at 7:30pm
Hurray For Hollywood!
Peter Jay Sharp Theater, The Juilliard School | New York, NY
Tickets available in late Fall 2026

Program:
Songs by Stephen Sondheim, The Beatles, Burt Bacharach, and Herman Hupfeld

Featuring:
Students of the Marcus Institute for Vocal Arts

Wednesday, February 10, 2027 at 8:00pm
United We Stand
Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center | New York, NY
Link: www.kaufmanmusiccenter.org/mch/event/new-york-festival-of-song-united-we-stand

Program:
Songs by Joni Mitchell, Carlos López Buchardo, Fairuz, and Franz Schubert

Theo Hoffman, baritone
Shelén Hughes Camacho, soprano
Shiyu Zhuo, soprano
Steven Blier, host and pianist
Bénédicte Jourdois, pianist

Tuesday, March 9, 2027 at 8:00pm
Guilty Pleasures
Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center | New York, NY
Link: www.kaufmanmusiccenter.org/mch/event/new-york-festival-of-song-guilty-pleasures

Program:
Songs by Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten, John Jacob Niles, Johannes Brahms, and Irving Berlin

Steven Blier, host and pianist
Bénédicte Jourdois, host and pianist

Caramoor 2027 Schwab Vocal Rising Stars
Monday, April 5, 2027 at 8:00pm
Harlem Renaissance
Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center | New York, NY
Link: www.kaufmanmusiccenter.org/mch/event/new-york-festival-of-song-harlem-renaissance

Program:
Songs by Fats Waller, Florence Price, Duke Ellington, Eubie Blake, J. Rosamond Johnson, and William Grant Still. Readings from Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.

Lucia Bradford, mezzo-soprano
Justin Austin, baritone
Steven Blier, host and pianist
Bénédicte Jourdois, pianist

Sunday, May 23, 2027 at 3:00pm
If We Can Love in This Lifetime (NYFOS Next)
The Theater at 150 W 17th Street | New York, NY
Link: nyfos.org/nyfos-next

Program:
Cecilia Livingston and Indyana Schneider – song cycle [World Premiere]
John Glover – After Him

Indyana Schneider, mezzo-soprano
Daniel McGrew, tenor
Michael Kelly, baritone

About leiken

leiken wields medieval fragments as living tools, compressing grief, ephemerality, and queerness until history buckles, bleeding into the present. Their work fuses early music, contemporary theatre, and ritual performance. The New York Times has written that leiken 'intones jokes and prophecies in a mournful descant, their voice as eerie as a singing wineglass.' Their sound has also been praised for its 'earthbound … gravitas' by New York Classical Review. A MacDowell Fellow and member of the medieval ensemble Sequentia, leiken has developed work for the Hirshhorn Museum, Lincoln Center, and the Getty Villa. The Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned Dead Songs, which filled the medieval sculpture hall with ten excavated songs of lust and longing, featuring wardrobe by Vivienne Westwood. Their new work, Ars Moriendi, builds on their experience as a funeral singer to confront a culture that has medicalized death and privatized mourning. Drawing on late-medieval 'art of dying' manuals, Ars Moriendi reminds us that death demands ritual. leiken also loves fermentation, textiles, and swimming.

About Shannon Keegan

Known for her 'emotional and deeply personal singing' (OperaWire) and what her friends would call 'an uncanny ability to take things too far,' Hungarian-American mezzo-soprano Shannon Keegan continues to captivate audiences with her 'luminous voice' (Ópera Actual) and fierce dramatic skill.

In the 2026/2027 season, Keegan made her debut as Lišák (the Fox) in The Cunning Little Vixen at The Dallas Opera. Next, she performs as Mary in Der fliegende Holländer at the Bayerische Staatsoper, Begbick in Weill's Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, Der Sandmann in Hänsel und Gretel with the Berlin Philharmonic, and Adalgisa in Norma with the Tokyo Philharmonic.

In the 2025/2026 season, Keegan debuted as Charlotte in Werther at the Teatro Municipal de Santiago. Keegan returned to the Staatsoper Stuttgart to sing Suzuki in Madama Butterfly and debuted in the same role at the Bayerische Staatsoper. Keegan was also asked to step in mid-performance to sing Adalgisa in Norma at the Bayerische Staatsoper. She then debuted at the Tiroler Festspiele Erl as Mary in Der fliegende Holländer.

Keegan made her recital debut as part of Carnegie Hall's Citywide Series, presenting Schubert's Schwanengesang. She has continued performing Schubert at the Antwerp Lied Festival, presenting both Schwanengesang and Winterreise.

Keegan received her training at the Staatsoper Stuttgart's Opernstudio as well as The Santa Fe Opera, Carnegie Hall's Song Studio, the Internationale Meistersinger Akademie, and Des Moines Metro Opera.

About Paul Appleby

Praised by The Times (London) for soaring 'effortlessly through the role's high-lying demands,' American tenor Paul Appleby is admired for his interpretive depth and vocal expressivity. His operatic repertoire spans the core Mozart roles of Tamino, Don Ottavio, and Ferrando, Debussy's Pelléas, Stravinsky's Tom Rakewell, and Wagner's David. He created the roles of Joe Cannon in the world premiere of John Adams and Peter Sellars' Girls of the Golden West at San Francisco Opera, Dutch National Opera, and with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel, and of Caesar in Adams' Antony and Cleopatra at San Francisco Opera. His enduring relationship with the Metropolitan Opera includes David in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg under Sir Antonio Pappano, Pelléas et Mélisande under Yannick Nézet-Séguin, The Rake's Progress with James Levine, and the North American premiere of Nico Muhly's Two Boys.

Appleby's 2026/2027 season includes Britten's War Requiem with the ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien under Marin Alsop and the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Edward Gardner, Beethoven's Christus am Ölberge with Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and return engagements with Houston Grand Opera as Tamino and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra as Don Ottavio under Fabio Luisi. A passionate advocate for art song, Appleby has appeared at Carnegie Hall, the Park Avenue Armory, the Kennedy Center, Wigmore Hall, and the Aspen and Caramoor Festivals. With pianist Ken Noda, he performed Schumann's Dichterliebe at Lincoln Center, and he has recorded works by Schubert and Britten as part of The Juilliard Sessions Digital Debut series on EMI Classics.

About Nathaniel LaNasa

Pianist Nathaniel LaNasa has been praised for his 'stormy lyricism' (The New York Times) and his 'poise and elegance' (Feast of Music). In 2022, he performed Ricky Ian Gordon's Intimate Apparel sixty times at Lincoln Center; he returned for Lincoln Center Theater's 2025/2026 Amahl and the Night Visitors with Joyce DiDonato. In May 2026, he performed Messiaen's Harawi at Wigmore Hall in London with Simone McIntosh. His recital partners have included Leona Mitchell, Will Liverman, and Gregory Feldmann; his premieres include works by Timo Andres, Matthew Ricketts, Molly Joyce, Iain Bell, and Iván Rodriguez.

LaNasa curates NYFOS Next at New York Festival of Song, where critics have praised his 'thematically coherent, well-paced, and musically varied' programs and his 'exquisite' piano playing. He also directs Chamber Music at Shelter Rock, a concert series on Long Island. A fierce advocate of new works, LaNasa has workshopped new operas at the Metropolitan Opera and Chautauqua Opera, and has prepared productions at Columbia's Miller Theatre, National Sawdust, Opera Grand Rapids, and the World Trade Center's Perelman Performing Arts Center. LaNasa has recorded new works for quarter-tone pianos by Dimitri Tymoczko at Princeton, chamber works by Tobias Picker for Tzadik, and a recent release by Dylan Mattingly with Contemporaneous. NYC credits include Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie Hall, MoMA, Brooklyn Art Song Society, and (le) Poisson Rouge. He has also performed at the Musée d'Orsay (Paris), Radio France (Paris), the Seattle Opera House, and Burning Man (Black Rock City). LaNasa is a graduate of The Juilliard School and the Manhattan School of Music.

About New York Festival of Song (NYFOS)

Now in its 39th season, New York Festival of Song (NYFOS) is dedicated to creating intimate song concerts of great beauty and originality. Weaving music, poetry, history, and humor into evenings of compelling theater, NYFOS fosters community among artists and audiences. Each program entertains and educates in equal measure. Founded by pianists Michael Barrett and Steven Blier in 1988, NYFOS continues to produce its series of thematic song programs, drawing together rarely heard songs of all kinds, overriding traditional distinctions between musical genres, exploring the character and language of other cultures and the personal voices of song composers and lyricists.

Since its founding, NYFOS has particularly celebrated American song. Among the many highlights is the double bill of one-act comic operas, Bastianello and Lucrezia, by John Musto and William Bolcom, both with libretti by Mark Campbell, commissioned and premiered by NYFOS in 2008 and recorded on Bridge Records. In addition to Bastianello and Lucrezia and the 2008 Bridge Records release of Spanish Love Songs with Joseph Kaiser and the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, NYFOS has produced five recordings on the Koch label, including a Grammy Award-winning disc of Bernstein's Arias and Barcarolles, and the Grammy-nominated recording of Ned Rorem's Evidence of Things Not Seen (also a NYFOS commission) on New World Records. In 2014, Canción Amorosa, a CD of Spanish song (Basque, Catalan, Castilian, and Sephardic) was released on the GPR label, with soprano Corinne Winters accompanied by Steven Blier.

In January of 2022, NYFOS Records issued its first album, From Rags to Riches, with Stephanie Blythe and William Burden. Its seventh album, My Brother's Keeper, was released to critical acclaim in May 2026. The new CD joins NYFOS Records' burgeoning discography, alongside A Picnic Cantata (2022), the first stereo recording of a hidden gem by Paul Bowles and James Schuyler; Black & Blue (2023), the debut solo album of British-American tenor Joshua Blue collaborating with Steven Blier; Mi País: Songs of Argentina (2023) featuring bass-baritone Federico De Michelis and pianist Steven Blier; NYFOS Records: The Singles, Vol. 1 (2024), a wide-ranging compilation drawn from over 20 years of archival material, including tracks featuring Michael Spyres, Justin Austin, and Bernarda Fink; and Schubert/Beatles (2025), with Theo Hoffman, Julia Bullock, Kunal Lahiri, and Mr. Blier, which was nominated for a 2025 Grammy Award. NYFOS Records has reached audiences in over 100 countries, with well over 2.5 million streams to date.

In November 2010, NYFOS debuted NYFOS Next, a mini-series for new songs, hosted by guest composers in intimate venues, including OPERA America's National Opera Center, National Sawdust, the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, and the Ann Goodman Recital Hall at Kaufman Music Center. Pianist and new music specialist Nathaniel LaNasa has served as series curator since 2022, when NYFOS Next found its current home, the former Rubin Museum space in Chelsea.

NYFOS is passionate about nurturing the artistry and careers of young singers, and has developed training residencies around the country, including programs with The Juilliard School's Ellen and James S. Marcus Institute for Vocal Arts (now in its 18th year); Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts (now in its 19th year); San Francisco Opera Center (over 20 years); Glimmerglass Opera (2008–2010); and its newest project, NYFOS@North Fork in Orient, NY.

NYFOS's concert series, touring programs, radio broadcasts, recordings, and educational activities continue to spark new interest in the creative possibilities of the song program and have inspired the creation of thematic vocal series around the world. Learn more at www.nyfos.org.

Photo Credit: leiken by Oriana Camara, courtesy of MacDowell; Shannon Keegan, courtesy of the artist; Paul Appleby by Jonathan Tichler; Nathaniel LaNasa, courtesy of the artist.