David Rubenstein Videos

How do we bear witness to a thing our bodies seem built to ignore? In Ashley Fure's immersive music-theater piece, created with her architect brother Adam Fure and the International Contemporary Ensemble, 24 subwoofer speakers emit sound too low for humans to hear, creating a subsonic sense of ecological anxiety that ripples around the audience. Under a dense canopy of sculpted matter, tones are "made tactile, objects made audible, noise made beautiful" (New York Times). Drama is steered away from the human, time is stretched to a geologic scale, and seven live performers act as wordless harbingers of a consciousness not limited to the living.

A chorus of some 800 experienced and amateur singers will premiere John Luther Adams's In the Name of the Earth in Central Park's Harlem Meer. The performance builds on two highly acclaimed outdoor world premieres commissioned previously for the Mostly Mozart Festival: 2014's Sila: The Breath of the World, also by John Luther Adams, and David Lang's the public domain, which marked the 50th anniversary of the Mostly Mozart Festival in 2016. Simon Halsey, who led the performance of the public domain, returns to the festival to conduct In the Name of the Earth.