New York Festival of Song Presents Fugitives

A Program Highlighting Artists Confronted in Their Time by
the Rise of Fascism in Europe, Including Kurt Weill, Franz Schreker,
Alexander Zemlinsky, Friedrich Hollaender, Kurt Tucholsky,
Erich Korngold, and Hanns Eisler

Featuring Mezzo-Soprano Kate Lindsey, Baritone Justin Austin, 
and Pianists Steven Blier and Bénédicte Jourdois

Thursday, February 12, 2026 at 8:00pm 
Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center | New York, NY
 

“Everything that a song recital can achieve, in terms of musical revelation, vocal excellence and audience engagement, was exemplified… [in] the New York Festival of Song's Fugitives.” – The Washington Post 

“A NYFOS concert is always a revelation and a joy to experience.” – Opera News 

www.nyfos.org

New York, NY (January 13, 2026) – New York Festival of Song (NYFOS), led by Artistic Director Steven Blier, presents its critically acclaimed program Fugitives on Thursday, February 12, 2026, at 8:00pm at Kaufman Music Center’s Merkin Hall. The program brings together songs from the concert stage, movies, Broadway, and Berlin’s cabarets, highlighting the artistic lives that were shaped, uprooted, and sometimes extinguished during the rise of fascism in Europe. The New York Times wrote of Fugitives: “The poignant ache of numerous songs accumulated throughout, abetted by the strong, stylish singing. … I can recall many Festival of Song programs as illuminating and entertaining, but none so profoundly moving.”

Mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey joins baritone Justin Austin alongside pianists Steven Blier and Bénédicte Jourdois to perform works by Kurt Weill, Franz Schreker, Alexander Zemlinsky, Friedrich Hollaender, Kurt Tucholsky, Erich Korngold, and Hanns Eisler, among others. Together, their music showcases a moment of extraordinary resilience and creativity forged under immense pressure.

Steven Blier shares, “This revival of Fugitives is a supercharged event for me. It brings one of my most cherished colleagues, Kate Lindsey, back to NYFOS after a long absence, during which time she’s enjoyed international triumphs from La Scala to The Met. And any chance to make music with the superb, multi-faceted Justin Austin is a red-letter day for me. Finally, it marks the first NYFOS concert with pianist Bénédicte Jourdois since she assumed the official capacity of Associate Artistic Director.

“Fugitives couldn’t be more timely. It tells the story of Jewish composers who found asylum in the United States during World War II. It also pays tribute to some of the gifted musicians who weren’t so blessed, meeting their deaths in concentration camps. The power and beauty – and humor – of Fugitives is especially poignant in our current times, and its message is even more urgent than when we first presented it 18 years ago.”

The 2025-26 NYFOS season continues with To The Sea on Wednesday, March 11, 2026 at 8:00pm at Merkin Hall; Poulenc/Sondheim on Tuesday, April 7, 2026 at 8:00pm at Merkin Hall; NYFOS’s annual Spring Gala on May 11, 2026, and the NYFOS Next Series, a special event created in collaboration with Luna Composition Lab, on June 1, 2026.

New York Festival of Song: Fugitives
Thursday, February 12, 2026 at 8:00pm
Merkin Hall At Kaufman Music Center | New York, NY
Tickets: $20-79
Link: www.kaufmanmusiccenter.org/mch/event/new-york-festival-of-song-fugitives/ 

About Kate Lindsey
“One cannot overpraise Lindsey’s ability to characterize strongly while retaining beauty of tone when the music calls for such.” (San Francisco Classical Voice)

One of the most compelling artists of her generation, mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey is a regular guest on the world’s most celebrated stages, including the Metropolitan Opera, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, the Vienna State Opera, the Salzburg Festival, Glyndebourne Opera Festival, Festival Aix-en-Provence, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, and the Bavarian State Opera.

In 2025/26, Kate Lindsey continues to dazzle audiences in a wide variety of role debuts and new productions. Lindsey commences her season with a highly anticipated debut as Mélisande in Pelléas et Mélisande at the Vienna State Opera, conducted by Alain Altinoglu. At the Hamburg State Opera, she appears in Tobias Kratzer’s Women’s Love and Death, where she sings Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben under the musical direction of Karina Canellakis. Lindsey further takes on the title role in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride at the Washington Concert Opera and returns to the Munich State Opera as Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro. Learn more at www.katelindsey.com.

About Justin Austin
Possessing a “mighty lyric voice” (The New York Times), “with a burly, burnished tone capable of striking nuance and color” (The Washington Post), Drama Desk Award-nominated baritone Justin Austin was named Rising Star of the Year at the 2024 International Opera Awards and is a recipient of the 2024 Marian Anderson Vocal Award.

During the 2025-26 season, Justin makes his house debut at San Francisco Opera in the title role of The Barber of Seville and joins Houston Grand Opera as Jake in a new production of Porgy and Bess alongside Angel Blue. He returns to Washington National Opera to star in Damien Sneed’s new edition of Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha as Remus, La Jolla Music Society for Damien Geter’s COTTON, and New York Festival of Song for Fugitives, a new recital program. He also joins Florentine Opera for a recital of operatic favorites, Opera Laguna for Handel’s Messiah, and MasterVoices at Alice Tully Hall for Fauré’s Requiem, and brings the concert suite of Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up In My Bones to New Orleans Opera, the Harriman-Jewell series, and the University of Notre Dame.

Justin has received accolades and awards from The Recording Academy, NAACP, George London Foundation, Washington National Opera, Opera Theatre of St. Louis, St. Louis Theater Circle, Opera Ebony, Gerda Lissner Foundation, Manhattan School of Music, NANM, Choir Academy of Harlem, and Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts.

Born in Stuttgart, Germany, Justin Austin is an alumnus of the Choir Academy of Harlem, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, Heidelberg Lied Akademie, and Manhattan School of Music (M.M. and B.M.). Learn more at www.justin-austin.com.

About Steven Blier
Steven Blier is the Artistic Director of the New York Festival of Song (NYFOS), which he co-founded in 1988 with Michael Barrett. Since its inception, he has programmed, performed, translated, and annotated more than 170 vocal recitals with repertoire spanning five centuries of art song and popular music. New York Magazine gave NYFOS its award for Best Classical Programming, while Opera News proclaimed Blier “the coolest dude in town.”

In November 2025, Norton Books published Blier’s memoir From Ear to Ear: A Pianist’s Love Affair with Song. It was chosen as a Wall Street Journal “Best Book of the Year.”

Mr. Blier’s recital partners have included Renée Fleming, Cecilia Bartoli, Samuel Ramey, Susan Graham, Jessye Norman, and José van Dam, in venues ranging from Carnegie Hall to La Scala. He has premiered works of Corigliano, Moravec, Rorem, and Bolcom, many of which were commissioned by NYFOS.

A Juilliard faculty member, many of his students, including Julia Bullock, Sasha Cooke, Paul Appleby, and John Brancy, have gone on to be valued recitalists and international opera stars.

Mr. Blier launched NYFOS Records in 2021. Its latest release is the Grammy®-nominated Schubert / Beatles, with baritone Theo Hoffman. Blier’s extensive discography also includes the Grammy®-winning premiere recording of Bernstein’s Arias and Barcarolles (Koch International).

A native New Yorker, Blier received a BA with Honors in English Literature at Yale University, studying piano with Alexander Farkas. He completed his musical studies in New York with Martin Isepp and Paul Jacobs. 

About Bénédicte Jourdois
French pianist and vocal coach Bénédicte Jourdois is the Associate Artistic Director of the New York Festival of Song, a teacher and coach at the Juilliard School and the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, and a member of the Met Music Staff. Since 2019, she has co-directed the Schwab Vocal Rising Stars program at Caramoor with Steven Blier. 

An active recitalist, Ms. Jourdois regularly performs throughout Europe and the United States. As a coach and pianist, she has worked with Carnegie Hall’s SongStudio, the Merola Opera Program at San Francisco Opera, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, Washington National Opera, Washington Concert Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Chicago Lyric Ryan Opera Center, Chicago Opera Theatre, Pittsburgh Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Palm Beach Opera, Opera Saratoga, Rice University, the Chautauqua Institution voice program, the Castleton Festival, Spoleto Festival USA, and Folkestone on Song in Kent. She was previously a faculty member at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and at the Manhattan School of Music. 

Born in Paris, Ms. Jourdois holds degrees from the Conservatoire National de Région de Saint-Maur, the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Lyon, Mannes College, and the Juilliard School and is a graduate of the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program at The Metropolitan Opera. She started her coaching career as a pianist for her mentor, Marlena Malas, in New York and in Chautauqua.

About New York Festival of Song
Now in its 38th 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. In January of 2025, they released their sixth album, Schubert/Beatles, with Theo Hoffman, Julia Bullock, Kunal Lahiri, and Mr. Blier, which was nominated for a 2026 Grammy Award. The new CD joins NYFOS Records’s 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 and Steven Blier; and 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. NYFOS Records has reached rapidly growing 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, 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 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 (its 18th year in March 2026); San Francisco Opera Center (over 20 years as of February 2018); 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: Yulia Oliver-Taylor