New commission for The Hermes Experiment
The dynamic ensemble returns with works that blur the boundaries between music, theatre and improvisation
The dynamic ensemble returns with works that blur the boundaries between music, theatre and improvisation
“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.”
“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.”
Double Recital Elaine Mitchener and Juliet Fraser at Darmstädter Ferienkurse 2023
Eight Songs remains an intensely visceral piece with the capacity to shock
“Mitchener inhabited King George’s fracturing identities with an unsettling intensity.”
Elaine Mitchener will become the first woman in the UK to perform Eight Songs for a Mad King on 26th May 2023
“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.”
“Me being onstage as a Black experimental contemporary music vocalist,” Mitchener said, “is in itself a political act.”