Eight Songs for a Mad King in the news
Eight Songs remains an intensely visceral piece with the capacity to shock
Author: pierre
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.”
The Wire – May 2023
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.”
1 July 2026
[vc_row content_text_aligment="" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no"][vc_column][vc_column_text css=""] Rich Mix - 19:00 No Man Is an Island Soprano Mimi Doulton performs brand new works from British-Caribbean composer Elaine Mitchener; Irish composer Linda Buckley; and Estonian composer Krõõt-Kärt
13 June 2026
[vc_row content_text_aligment="" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no"][vc_column][vc_column_text css=""] ORF RadioKulturhaus - Vienna, Austria 19:30 No More Excuses I Klangforum Wien Programme: Nyokabi Kariùki, Tania León, Elaine Mitchener, Bára Gísladóttir, Ailís Ní Ríain Elaine Mitchener the/e so/ou/nd be/t/ween Voice: Sofia Jernberg A project