Duo Étrange is an award winning voice an cello duo founded by cellist Sahara von Hattenberger and soprano Vanessa Croome. Dedicated to the creation and performance of new works for voice and cello. New Music USA 2025 Creator Fund award winners and a Canada Council for the Arts supported ensemble. The duo has received remarkable early success since their founding in 2023.
"Gifted and promising... Duo Étrange is redefining vocal chamber music” (Pan M 360).
Their début album will be released with ATMA Classique on February 24th, 2026 alongside a début at Salle Bourgie. The album will feature four world premieres by celebrated composers Nicole Lizée, Airat Ichmouratov, Laurence Jobidon and Jeffrey Fong alongside works by Anders Hillborg, Luna Pearl Woolf, and Maya Fridman.
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The Duo is rapidly making a name for themselves on the concert stage and in the world of new music with international débuts at Salle Bourgie, Avaloch Farm Music Institute, Le Vivier, and Montreal's historic concert series Chapelle Historique du Bon Pasteur slated for 2026 and 2027. In June 2025, Duo Étrange was featured as part of a gallery showcase with Metropolitan Opera director Marcus Shields and Broadway scenographer Frank J Oliva for their multi-disciplinary concert concept Very Feral Today. Additional recent artistic residencies include Yellow Barn and Avaloch Farm developing an original arrangement of Ligeti's Mysteries of the Macabre for cello and vocal-percussionist. The Duo's upcoming commission supported by New Music USA will feature a new song collection by the genre-bending prodigious young composer Kebra Seyoun-Charles.
Photographs of Very Feral Today (credits: Marcus Shields, Rodolfo Sanches)
A shared history —
Co-founded by cellist Sahara von Hattenberger and soprano Vanessa Croome, the mission of Duo Étrange is to develop engaging chamber music for modern audiences by blending classical traditions with modern aesthetics. Brought together by John Tavener's setting of Anna Akhmatova's poetry, the Duo discovered the pairing of soprano and cello, while uncommon in the classical canon, connects them to new sound worlds, inspired by the rich tradition of troubadour and singer-songwriter performers.
Vanessa and Sahara’s story has been intertwined since childhood. Both grew up as young musicians in small towns on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, just an hour’s drive apart from each other, and both went on to study at McGill University after leaving home at 16. Yet their paths did not cross until 2023, when they collaborated for the first time at Montreal’s Chapelle historique du Bon-Pasteur — one of the venue’s final concerts before a tragic fire. Their friendship and artistic partnership feel destined, rooted in shared origins and a mutual drive to explore the world through music.
Today, Duo Étrange divides its time between Montreal and New York.
