Eight Songs for a Mad King
‘⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ in this fierce account from Manchester Camerata, conductor John Andrew’s and mezzo-soprano Rosie Middleton we felt it all: every desperate clutch for sanity, every hairpin bend of reason, every queasy realisation and glassy-eyed forgetting…Brutal, brilliant music-theatre.’
Alexandra Coghlan, The Guardian
‘⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ All praise should be heaped on Middleton for her brave evocation and the vocal prowess of her performance. She managed to elicit sympathy and humanity amongst the darkness and disturbing absurdity of the work.’
Chris Garlick, Bachtrack
’It was mezzo-soprano Rosie Middleton’s assumption of the role of the King that was staggering in its resonance. Completely convincing in every scream, every shout, every whisper.’
Colin Clarke, Seen and Heard International
12HOURS
’an intensely virtuosic series of thrilling variations from Middleton’s live voice, radiant, violent and exhaustingly enduring.’
’In the final hour, Middleton sang a sustained, lamenting threnody, inflected by microtonal twists and turns of keening beauty.’
’a mesmerising, inexorable examination of voice and singer at a subatomic level’
Benjamin Poore (Opera Magazine, December 2024)
PLASTIC BODIES
‘The impact is astonishing, like listening to that doyenne of avant-garde vocal performance Cathy Berberian with an axe to grind’
Flora Willson (Times Literary Supplement)
’five stars’
’great nuance’
Lauren McQuiston (Opera Now)
voice(less)
‘A mesmerising performance of a stunningly powerful work.’
Simon Cummings (5against4.com)
‘Manchester-born Middleton is clearly at home in high-tension psychodramas that push at the limits of vocal technique’
Robert Barry (The Wire)
The Blue Woman
‘Rosie Middleton…rose to the occasion with superlative communication and perfectly placed arresting high interjections’
Caroline Potter (I care if you listen)
Pierrot Lunaire
’a staggeringly good Pierrot Lunaire’
Alexandra Coghlan (New Statesman)