When American soprano Rachel Mink steps up with the Ellery String Quartet to perform for Art Song Canberra, the audience will sense quite a different flavour from the usual lieder repertoire.

For the concert, Young Voices America, which has been partly-funded by the famous Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore where Mink studied, will involve some of the most exciting composers working today in the US.

One work is a world premiere, but it’s not all new music as, chosen from Mink’s personal songbook of favourites, there’ll also be numbers by George Gershwin in between works by Pulitzer Prize-winner Caroline Shaw, by Mink’s former classmate at Peabody Aaron Mencher and by violin-playing pop artist, Kishi Bashi.

Mink moved to Canberra during covid for personal reasons and divides her time between here and Sydney, working variously for the education organisation The Song Room in Sydney and as philanthropy manager for Luminescence in Canberra, also producing with Sydney Symphony Orchestra. But when I catch up with her by phone, she’s about to return full-time to the ACT.

According to Roland Peelman, who is now artistic adviser to Art Song and the brains behind this initiative, Mink is “a fun girl, very talented and smart”.

His role will be to “give it a helping hand” by conducting the world premiere of Mencher’s Atmospheres of the Night.

“It’s quite a complex piece and very virtuosic for the soprano, a tour de force that ranges in tone from the creepy to the radiant… it’s about what we imagine at night, the kind of radiance we imagine, the different perception of what we see… it’s very extreme, and instrumental, like a soundscape,” Peelman says. 

The work was written specifically for Mink, who tells me: “Aaron and I met at Peabody in 2019… and we bonded over an aural skills class. He was a composition student and we decided to work together, but it was difficult to find poetry, so we commissioned it from our poet friend Brandy Hoang Collier.”

She agrees with Peelman about the complexity of Atmospheres of the Night, saying: “There’s a lot of play with ambience – a lot of metre and register-changing, which forced me to use all my skills learnt as a singer.”

She and Peelman both praise the Ellery String Quartet – Brad Tham and Anika Chan on violin, Pippa Newman on viola and Chloe Law cello – who will perform this challenging work, which has been five years coming.

But there’s a lot more to this concert, and Peelman declares himself proud of how Art Song is now bringing in new work by women, with the Australian premiere of Caroline Shaw’s By and By, based on American folk idiom, written for string quartet but evoking the sounds of instruments such as the ukulele, along with her work, Plan and Elevation.

As a member of the Grammy-winning vocal band Roomful of Teeth, who performed at The Street theatre in 2020, Shaw was the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013 for her Partita for 8 Voices and more recently won the 2022 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. 

And you can never accuse Mink or Peelman of being too arty, with the canny inclusion of Bittersweet Genesis For Him And Her and This Must Be the Place (after Talking Heads) by American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and filmmaker, Kishi Bashi.

That’s a sure sign that this is art song with a difference.

Young Voices of America, Wesley Music Centre, Forrest, November 24.