New commission for The Hermes Experiment
The dynamic ensemble returns with works that blur the boundaries between music, theatre and improvisation
Author: pierre
Tempo – October 2023
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.”
Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt (IMD) – August 2023
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.”
Elaine Mitchener & Juliet Fraser at Darmstadt Summer Course 2023
Double Recital Elaine Mitchener and Juliet Fraser at Darmstädter Ferienkurse 2023
Eight Songs for a Mad King in the news
Eight Songs remains an intensely visceral piece with the capacity to shock
Prospect Magazine – 14 July 2023
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.”
Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King at Wigmore Hall
Elaine Mitchener will become the first woman in the UK to perform Eight Songs for a Mad King on 26th May 2023
VAN Magazine – 1 June 2023
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.”
The New York Times – 24 May 2023
Madness, Royalty and the Music of Screams
Hugh Morris
“Me being onstage as a Black experimental contemporary music vocalist,” Mitchener said, “is in itself a political act.”