★★☆☆☆Since its 1969 premiere, the list of necessities for Peter Maxwell Davies’s usually unnerving music-theatre classic Eight Songs for a Mad King have include
Elaine Mitchener will draw on a range of extended vocal techniques to give a sensitive portrait of mental illness in the music theater piece “Eight Songs for a Mad King.”
Eleaine Mitchener said that extensive historical research had given her “a much more sympathetic approach to the character” of King George III. Elaine…
As vocalist Elaine Mitchener prepares to perform Peter Maxwell Davies’s explosive 1969 monodrama at London’s Wigmore Hall, David Grundy details past renditions and speaks with Mitchener about new intersectional perspectives on the piece