ABSTRACT
Nicholas Chare: As part of Defixiones you give a potent, highly original rendition of Paul Celan's well known poem Todesfuge. Other Celan poems have been sung before; perhaps most notably by Ute Lemper in Michael Nyman's Songbook, but these interpretations have always seemed too beautiful given the pain resting beneath Celan's words. We do not think that this is a claim that can be made about your own performance but when you were singing about the genocides perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks and the Nazis, were you conscious of the danger of aestheticizing the horror?
