Most of this year’s NYFOS programs have been tied to earthly concerns—societal, cultural, psychological, political. After the tumult of past few months, though, some of us might be feeling that the world is too much with us—or more aptly, that the world is too much against us. Our final concert of the season seemed like the right moment for a break, and so we offer you Other Worlds, a program devoted to fantasy, the lure of magic, figures dimly glimpsed in the half-light, ghosts, and sea-monsters. Jung saw fairy tales as a way to understand the human psyche through archetypal characters, while Freud thought they gave voice to repressed desires. We don’t have to choose between the two great psychiatrists’ philosophies; both interpretations are there to give us support in our roiling, uncertain world, providing a defense against the assault of the 24-hour news cycle.

Given the cultural impact of the Grimm brothers’ German Legends, it seemed appropriate to begin with a healthy selection of Lieder by Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann. They both embody the Romantic spirit the Grimm brothers prized, each of them in his own unique tonality. While Mendelssohn was steeped in the earnest counterpoint of Bach and influenced by the weightiness of Beethoven’s late works, his greatest gift was a strain of lightheartedness that comes to the fore in many of his works, a sense of caprice quite unlike any of the masters who preceded him. The best-known example of this quality is his score for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whose famous march has climaxed many a modern wedding ceremony. Tonight we’ve grabbed the “Elf March” from that score as a prelude to two of Mendelssohn’s most fantastical songs, “Neue Liebe” and “Hexenlied.” The lyrics in both suggest a lurking menace, but in spite of that the composer leaves the listener with a buzzy feeling of joy—the trademark Mendelssohn sparkle.

Schumann’s musical world is like a portrait of his complex personality. These days he would most likely be diagnosed with bipolar disorder. But even had he been a paragon of mental health, the chaos of his upbringing could easily have led to the wild mood swings that dominated his life. His father died young, his sister committed suicide, his mother was a person of violent emotion; syphilis would ultimately drive him mad. Drama even pursued him during his courtship: his fiancée’s father forbade their union, and he and Clara Wieck took him to court. Schumann wrote the lion’s share of his songs—140 in number, including his three major song cycles—during 1840, as they awaited a court ruling on their marriage. In August of that year, they won the case. Clara Wieck became Frau Schumann.

Elements of fantasy permeate Schumann’s songs. The ancient lore he celebrates in “Aus alten Märchen” is often hovering over his music, but rarely with the elfin spirit of Mendelssohn. Instead, he creates fifty shades of mystery and disquiet. In “Waldesgespräch” a man leaves his hunting party in order to seduce a beautiful young woman, only to fall in her snares when she reveals she is the witch Lorelei; in “Auf eine Burg,” a foreboding statue high on a mountain witnesses what seems to be a forced marriage—a grim wedding party with a weeping bride.

If there were any remaining doubt about Schumann’s connection to fantasy, he wrote two suites explicitly called Fantasiestücke, one for solo piano and one for piano and clarinet. It is the second of these we’re sampling tonight. Written over the span of just two days in 1849, they turn Schumann’s mood swings, from introversion to exhilaration, into a hymn to the creative power of the imagination. Schumann considered this period to be the height of his career as a composer, and it was certainly one his most productive.

Clara Schumann was not a prolific composer; her celebrity as a pianist and her importance as a teacher eclipsed her output of songs, piano pieces, concerti, and chamber music. These days her star is rising once again. “Lorelei” was written in 1843, a year which saw some of Robert Schumann’s greatest triumphs, but also his first serious mental breakdown. Freud might have analyzed Clara Schumann’s song as a symbolic representation of their relative emotional health: the man destroyed on the rocks, the woman singing with mesmerizing beauty. But Freud’s heyday was still decades in the future.

Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote his valedictory Three Vocalises in 1958, the last year of his life. We’re letting its otherworldly, evocative first movement take us from the forests down to the sea, the residence of two malign spirits who are able to take on lifelike form to destroy human prey. The first is Rebecca Clarke’s “The Seal Man,” whose poem, by John Masefield, has the subtitle, “Them that live in the water, they have ways of calling people.” Clarke’s setting uses the piano with tremendous delicacy, alternating impressionistic swirls, powerful flashes of color, and abrupt, open spaces. She times the storytelling perfectly, allowing the climax to detonate slowly, and she creates three indelible characters—even the mother, with no lines to speak, is a vivid presence. Clarke, with roots in Germany and Britain, eventually came to live in New York. Composing was a sideline to her primary career as a star violist (a rarity in any generation). Living in an era when female composers were anomalies and considered second-class citizens, she eventually stopped writing music, despite the popular and critical success of many of her works. She would be happy to know that “The Seal Man” has recently entered the modern art song canon.

Jean Sibelius composed “Under strandens granar” in 1892, at the age of 26. As he set Runeberg’s poem of an evil (and apparently bisexual) water sprite, Sibelius was enjoying a lakeside honeymoon with his new bride, Aino. The great upheavals of his life were still in the future—his near-death illness in 1907, the dramas of his marriage, the death of one of his daughters, and his silence as a composer during his final three decades. Prior to Sibelius’s sudden withdrawal from music, his contributions to the repertoire included a healthy amount of art songs, many of which get frequent (and well-deserved) hearings. Some have big, broad melodies, some are more delicate, but he always makes hearty, often orchestral use of the piano, and he doesn’t shy away from big vocal effects. Sibelius’s shimmering, Technicolor piano sonority and bold vocal line are on full display in tonight’s ballad.

Once in a while it’s fun to include a piece from “Classical Music’s Greatest Hits.” Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” makes it onto almost all of those lists. The English title is slightly misleading; the original translates roughly to “In the Mountain Castle of the Troll King,” and the famous march comes from Grieg’s incidental music for Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. In the original play, the scene is a dream-fantasy sequence in which the title character enters the great hall where he is greeted by elves, gnomes, and goblins. Peer has a jones for the Troll King’s beautiful daughter, and the King is open to the idea of the marriage—on the condition that Peer becomes a troll himself. He balks at the proposition and effects an escape. Grieg’s music is intentionally ironic; he said that he had written “something that so reeks of cowpats [and] ultra-Norwegianism” that no one could miss its mordant mockery. It is pure cartoon music, and also one of classical music’s great crowd-pleasers.

Peer Gynt ultimately finds his way home—and so do we. Safely on American turf, we offer “Nature Boy,” which was Nat “King” Cole’s very first hit song in 1948. The music and lyrics are by one “eden ahbez,” né George McGrew. McGrew/ahbez was a California hippie (before the word was even invented) who had been drawn into the “Nature Boys,” a group of long-haired, bearded men whose diet consisted only of raw fruits and vegetables, espousing a philosophy of high-minded values and a life spent close to nature (ahbez himself lived in a cave near Palm Springs). He wrote the song as a tribute to his mentor, a man named Bill Pester, as well as a touching, vulnerable self-portrait. Certainly it takes the prize as the most eccentric origin story for a Great American Songbook standard.

ahbez might well have looked kindly on Liza Lehmann’s 1917 hit, “There Are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden.” They, too, live close to nature and seem to lead clean lives—they’re probably vegetarians as well. Lehmann’s career in music straddled composing and singing, and she left an oeuvre of parlor pieces whose charms evoke a bygone time. “There Are Fairies” was in the repertoire of coloratura soprano Amelita Galli-Curci, who no doubt sang it with great sweetness. But it was comedienne Beatrice Lillie who kept the song alive in the 1950s and 60s—her assured, outrageously campy rendition on the Ed Sullivan Show can be sampled at your leisure on YouTube. (Recommended.)

If you are coming up blank on British composer Wolseley Charles, you’re in good company. He didn’t leave behind much of a footprint besides his irresistible barn-burner, “The Green-Eyed Dragon.” In tandem with lyricist Greatrex Newman, Charles devoted his talents to a series of musicals. Stanley Holloway, best known for creating the role of Alfred P. Doolittle in My Fair Lady, had a great hit with “Dragon,” and since then it has been a sturdy encore song for generations of baritones who enjoy a chance to ham it up.

“Never Never Land,” the American classic by Jule Styne, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green, rounds out the program with a dose of American optimism. After being threatened by monsters and seduced by lethal temptresses, we can use the comfort of a Candy Land Eden, a place where we can remain young forever.

The concept and the repertoire for tonight’s concert are far-ranging, and have everything to do with the team of performers onstage. After the pleasure of presenting programs with the supremely gifted pianist Peter Dugan for the past two seasons (Heroes and Perennials), I longed for another chance to collaborate. Peter brought along his dream team, vocalists John Brancy and Kara Dugan (both of them former students of mine) and virtuoso clarinetist Mark Dover. Drawing on the eclectic stockpile of songs the four of them have honed over the years, we built a program that explores the glories and the terrors of the supernatural, the promised paradise of imaginary lands, and most of all the power of the imagination—the secret weapon of all artists, but especially this gifted ensemble. I’m honored to share the stage with them tonight.

Other Worlds: Songs of Fantasy will be performed in Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center (129 W 67th St, NYC), April 9 at 8PM. More info.