Press

Elaine Mitchener/Apartment House, Wigmore Hall, 26 May 2023

Caroline Potter

“Mitchener’s performance was quite simply extraordinary. She held nothing back in her traversal of the enormous vocal range of the work, and her total inhabiting of the character was the enduring memory of the evening.”

IN CONVERSATION WITH ELAINE MITCHENER AND JULIET FRASER

Sophie Emilie Beha

“They are among the most versatile and go-getting singers of our time. Elaine Mitchener deepened her love of singing as a teenager, through gospel music and jazz, and later through classical training at the conservatory. Juliet Fraser did not begin singing seriously until she was 20 years old – until then she wanted to be an oboist. For both, singing was a need, a form of artistic expression, a fulfillment.”

When classical, rock and jazz music all pondered the meaning of England

Philip Clark

“Mitchener inhabited King George’s fracturing identities with an unsettling intensity.”

A Chained Man’s Bruise

Madness and empire in “Eight Songs for a Mad King”

Benjamin Poore

“With one degree of separation, ‘Eight Songs’ records the sound of the injured and dying from a war between colonial powers. Mitchener’s version shows another vector of that violence: the foundational barbarity wreaked by empire on a different set of bodies.”

Hugh Morris

“Me being onstage as a Black experimental contemporary music vocalist,” Mitchener said, “is in itself a political act.”

A Cry of Anguish: Eight Songs For A Mad King

David Grundy

“Eight Songs remains an intensely visceral piece with the capacity to shock. More than that, though, it prompts reflection on the treatment of mental health and the fraught legacies of empire, issues which are still very much with us.”

“The Job Is to Make the Score Live.” Elaine Mitchener on On Being Human as Praxis

Kristoffer Patrick Cornils

“On Being Human as Praxis” was conceived by Elaine Mitchener. The vocal artist invited five different composers—Jason Yarde, Matana Roberts, Laure M. Hiendl, Tansy Davies, and George E. Lewis—to respond to the work of the Jamaican feminist and cultural theorist Sylvia Winter.

Womens Work, Wigmore Hall

Jo Hutton

“The ensemble exit the stage to Alison Knowles’s Shuffle, concluding a powerful evening of profound reflection on women’s influence in the world.”