Emily D'angelo Freezing

Canadian-Italian singer Emily D’Angelo announces her upcoming second solo DG album freezing, which features seventeen songs drawn from folk tradition, art song and beyond. The mezzo-soprano offers a personal take on music that spans five centuries, ranging from songs by John Dowland and Henry Purcell; Rebecca Clarke, Zoltán Kodály, W.C. Handy and Philip Glass; to recent works by Randy Newman, Jeanine Tesori, Cecilia Livingston, “Adrian Ira” Kramer and US band Ween.

Canadian-Italian singer Emily D’Angelo announces her upcoming second solo DG album freezing, which features seventeen songs drawn from folk tradition, art song and beyond. The mezzo-soprano offers a personal take on music that spans five centuries, ranging from songs by John Dowland and Henry Purcell; Rebecca Clarke, Zoltán Kodály, W.C. Handy and Philip Glass; to recent works by Randy Newman, Jeanine Tesori, Cecilia Livingston, “Adrian Ira” Kramer and US band Ween.

This recording is the culmination of 10 years of research by Dr Emily Baines, and it brings to dazzling life the fascinating and effervescent performance style found in eighteenth-century mechanical musical instruments. It contains never before heard transcriptions of music, found in eighteenth-century barrel organs and musical clocks.

Susanna comes late in the sequence of Handel’s oratorios but in some ways the composer looks back in it to his experience of Italian opera. It largely comprises a sequence of arias (many in the repeated, da capo form of opera seria) as it relates the story from the Biblical Apocrypha of Susanna who is falsely accused of adultery and eventually vindicated through the clever judicial manoeuvrings of the young prophet Daniel.