“You get this idea of someone knowing that something is not right,” experimental vocalist Elaine Mitchener says of Peter Maxwell Davies’s “Eight Songs for a Mad King.” “It’s askew. You know the headache you have when you have a migraine—you can’t actually see something in front of the eye? That’s how I feel with this: that there’s something obscuring [your vision]…you’re looking for a clearing.”
A Chained Man’s Bruise
Madness and empire in “Eight Songs for a Mad King”
