Jake Landau is collaborating with vocalist and songwriter Tatum Robertson on an original R&B song cycle, newly selected for New Marigny Theatre’s 2026–2027 Artist-in-Residence program in New Orleans. The project takes the narrative architecture of the classical song cycle and rebuilds it in the language of contemporary R&B. The result is a work that interrogates both genres rather than simply blending them. Robertson, a New Orleans native trained at The Juilliard School, Longy School of Music, and Boston University, will develop the cycle through the residency alongside Landau, building toward her debut EP.

In This Short Life

Saturday, April 10, 2027

7:30 PM  9:00 PM

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SCHOENBERG  –  Chamber Symphony No. 1
TAKEMITSU  –  Rain Coming
BERIO  –  Beatles Songs
LANDAU - Songs from In This Short Life, including:

Sew My True Love (Jubilee), The Sake Of You, orch. Landau
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Devony Smith, mezzo-soprano

After the catastrophe of World War I, much of classical music turned from Romantic emotionality to objectivity, structure, and cool intelligence. But was this cool intelligence sufficient in capturing the spectrum of 20th century emotion? Join Parlando as they trace that arc from Schoenberg's first explorations of serialism, through Takemitsu's luminous impressionism and Berio's tender reimagining of the Beatles, to art songs by David Lang, Will Liverman, and Jake Landau from In This Short Life, a meditation on love, life, and the ephemeral. Soprano Devony Smith joins Parlando for a program about what endures when the modern world strips everything else away.

Featuring the world premiere of Landau's orchestrations of his art songs "Sew My True Love (Jubilee)" and "The Sake Of You".

Tickets here

Heartbeat Opera's "The Duel" gathers some of the most distinct voices spanning contemporary Opera and Musical Theater today. Featuring writers Reese Anderson, Mark Campbell, Christian De Gré Cárdenas, Susan Kander, Jake Landau, Nevada Lozano, Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, Kamala Sankaram, and Dan Schlosberg, this concert  commissions different musical responses to the same prompt, presenting them all at 54 Below.

Following their recent collaboration on Mark Campbell's one-man musical Songs From An Unmade Bed, Jake and Mark pair up again for "The Duel", this time in the realm of opera.