Author: pierre

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.”

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.”