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Under the title NEGOTIATING HUMANITY – FUTURE BEGINS, the festival puts fundamental questions about humanity up for negotiation. On the opening night, a clear declaration is made: a commitment to humanity—more precisely, to the unbreakable humanity found in art and in the shared experience of it. St. Mary’s Cathedral, with its overwhelming spatial and acoustic scale, becomes the resonating chamber for this declaration. Here, the most diverse musical languages and worldviews of the past five centuries meet—along with equally diverse ideas of what makes us human, and how that humanity can find expression in music.
Following opening remarks by Bundesminister Christoph Wiederkehr, Landeshauptmann Thomas Stelzer, Bürgermeister Dietmar Prammer and Stadträtin Doris Lang-Mayerhofer, the extensive program, running late into the night, begins in the cathedral’s spacious downtown square. Club culture and Arab musical tradition are brought into close dialogue by Seba Kayan and Orwa Saleh, followed by a performance by actress and musician NENDA and a participatory project centered on the Declaration of Human Rights.
The second part of the evening takes place inside the cathedral itself, whose wide arc has spanned nearly five centuries of artistic engagement with human nature and the great questions of our existence—from Thomas Tallis’ polyphonic vocal music of the 16th century to the digital soundscapes of Japanese composer and sound artist evala and soprano Ayako Tanaka. Markus Poschner and the Bruckner Orchestra Linz guide us through Richard Wagner’s Parsifal overture, Olivier Messiaen’s symphonic meditations on the Ascension and the tonal colors of György Ligeti’s Lontano. Crystn Hunt Akron will premi...
Categories: Concert
Source: Event information supplied by Source: Ars Electronica Festival 2026; formatted by LocFeed..