ArnoldвЂ™s chantlike singing in the distance. On Saturday night, when the piece started, from my vantage point I could hear Ms. And not many heads, since only 48 people could be accommodated. There was one slightly funny element of the staging by the director and designer Jim Findlay: it was eerie to look across the platform and see rows of protruding heads. It is like sitting in a trench with the floor of the stage at about chin level. At the Clark Studio Theater the audience sits in short rows, back to back, that intersperse sections of the elevated stage platforms.

Lang elicits that tension in this strange and haunting piece.ДЇor the concept to work, of course, вЂњthe whisper opera,вЂќ presented by the Mostly Mozart festival, had to be performed in a space where the audience was close enough to hear, or almost hear, the musings. It is human nature to want to know more, to be included. In everyday life, when you notice someone whispering something to someone, you assume a secret is being shared. Arnold and the instrumentalists are whispering about. Arnold, stationing themselves in different corners of the platform, also whispering incomplete sentences and unanswered questions.Д«ut if the contemplative quality of вЂњthe whisper operaвЂќ comes from its quietude, its dramatic tension comes from the curiosity the piece sparks among audience members who want to know what Ms. And accompanied is the right word, since the musicians actually follow Ms. She was accompanied by four instrumentalists playing cello, percussion, various flutes and clarinets, all members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, known as ICE. For just over an hour the soprano Tony Arnold, the closest this experimental work has to an actual character, walks atop a small platform stage amid white lace curtains, sometimes humming chants but mostly whispering cryptic sentence fragments and phrases. The contemplative allure of вЂњthe whisper opera,вЂќ the new piece of lyric theater by the composer David Lang that had its New York premiere on Saturday night at Lincoln CenterвЂ™s Clark Studio Theater, comes from its pervasive softness, stillness and intimacy.

The whisperer piece