Eight Songs for a Mad King in the news
BBC Radio 3 – New Music Show
Tom Service presents the latest in new music performance, including a new interpretation of Peter Maxwell Davies’s explosive monodrama, Eight Songs for a Mad King, performed by vocalist Elaine Mitchener with Apartment House ensemble.
www.bbc.co.uk
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.”
www.thewire.co.uk
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.”
www.prospectmagazine.co.uk
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.”
www.van-magazine.com
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.”
Review
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.”
www.nytimes.com