MasterVoices Chorus at The Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn (Sept. 6-7) at Green-Wood Cemetary

On September 6-7, 2025, the MasterVoices Chorus sings in ARCH, an installation opera, by Kaleider, the UK-based production studio, at The Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn. The two free Down to Earth Festival performances are presented by CUNY Stages, The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at The Graduate Center CUNY, in partnership with MasterVoices and Green-Wood.

Kaleider’s ARCH, conceived and directed by Seth Honnor, is an attempt to build a freestanding arch, made two-thirds of concrete and one-third of ice, witnessed by a vigilant choir of human voices. Touching audiences with themes of death, renewal, and hope, ARCH points towards the extraordinary, yet flawed, systems humans create: language, economies, architectures, democracies – and, inevitably, to the impact of these systems on our ecosystem and ourselves. Kaleider's ARCH event unfolds under the open skies, a thought-provoking performance enchantingly accompanied by the watchful singers. A languageless score by Verity Standen accompanies a relentlessly physical performance, at times meditative, at others arresting and highly charged. During the performance, singers unobtrusively seated among the audience join the core singers’ voices, enlarging the impassioned focus on the task, and blurring the boundaries between performers and witnesses. Each singer leads a group in a different harmony, which interweaves with the others.

Details of MasterVoices’ 2025-26 season can be found at mastervoices.org and casting will be announced at a later date.