Review

British Vocalist Elaine Mitchener Busts it Wide Open on Solo Throat

Peter Margasak

“I wasn’t prepared for the remarkable focus, ingenuity, and invention behind her incredible new album Solo Throat (Otoroku), in which her vast oeuvre of extended techniques, literary inspiration, and improvisational thinking come together into something far more profound and jaw-dropping than the sum of its parts.”

Apartment House’s day of delight, insight and excellence at Wigmore Hall

Christopher Woodley

“Mitchener’s versatility was to the fore in a graphic rendition of the piece, producing a tightly controlled primal scream as she literally found her voice, all aglow with the light of her upper range.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

British Art Show 9: ‘A Scene At Once Thriving and Struggling To Survive’

 

Tom Jeffreys

“My thoughts for Art Review on British Art Show 9 – currently at Aberdeen Art Gallery then touring to Wolverhampton, Manchester & Plymouth. Highlights: Kathrin Böhm, Elaine Mitchener, Abigail Reynolds & Hrair Sarkissian.”

 

Gaudie Exclusive: BAS9 reviewed

 

Rory Buccheri

“Equally powerful and evocative is Elaine Mitchener‘s sound installation [NAMES II] (2019-2021), memorialising some of the 2,000 enslaved African people owned by an Aberdeenshire sugar planter in Jamaica.”

 

British Art Show offers an immersive voyage of discovery

 

Scott Begbie

“Elaine Mitchener’s poignant (NAMES II) is a roll-call of the 2,000 enslaved African people owned by an 18th century Jamaican sugar planter, whose family came from Aberdeenshire.”