Duo Étrange

Based between Brooklyn and Montréal, Duo Étrange is quickly earning recognition across North American spheres of opera, chamber music, and contemporary classical.

Named a 2026-2027 CBC/Radio-Canada Révélation, the national broadcaster's annual spotlight on the country's emerging artists to watch, the duo of soprano Vanessa Croome and cellist Sahara von Hattenberger is a classical voice-and-cello ensemble with a contemporary spirit, boldly expanding the chamber music tradition as it jumps the aisles between concert, opera, and theatre. Their repertoire is tonal and melody-forward, new music sung and played with a lyric warmth that wins over listeners who arrive certain it isn't for them. PAN M 360 calls the duo an ensemble "redefining vocal chamber music."

Collaboration sits at the centre of their work. The upcoming season brings new commissions from acclaimed American composers Gregory Spears and Jeffrey Mumford, as well as from Katerina Gimon and 2022 Sphinx Competition winner Kebra-Seyoun Charles, whose forthcoming song collection sets original texts by Croome. Their debut album, I Wish I Were Dead (ATMA Classique, 2026), a celebration of living music that asks why we so often honour composers only after they are gone, gathers works by six living composers, including four world-premiere commissions from Nicole Lizée, Airat Ichmouratov, Laurence Jobidon, and Jeffrey Fong. The album was launched with a concert at Montréal's Salle Bourgie, one of Canada's premier chamber music venues, in February 2026. New Music USA 2025 Creator Fund winners with support from the Canada Council for the Arts, they commission with purpose, championing female, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+ voices.

At the centre of the current season are concerts across Canada and the US, including a GatherNYC debut in January 2027 and a return to the Chapelle Historique du Bon Pasteur concert series at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Recent highlights include Very Feral Today, their theatre piece for voice and cello cocreated in New York with Met director Marcus Shields, and their selection as the 2026 Fromm Fellow Ensemble at the Composers Conference, with residencies at Avaloch Farm, Yellow Barn and Le Vivier. Equally at home on a mainstage classical series and a new-music festival, Duo Étrange thrills aficionados and new listeners alike, with their technical virtuosity paired with a commitment to musical storytelling that connects with the human experience.

Sahara and Vanessa's story is one of two parallel paths, never far apart. Growing up on Vancouver Island, on Canada's west coast, and later studying at McGill, they didn't meet until after graduation. They founded Duo Étrange in Montréal in 2023 with a recital at the Chapelle historique du Bon-Pasteur, driven by a shared passion for bringing the vocal and instrumental worlds closer together, so that future singers and instrumentalists won't have to wait so long to find each other.