Emily Harvel

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.

Recorded live at Brunel Goods Shed, 15 November 2020. Filmed and broadcast as a livestream by Northern Cowboys, the event brought together the full band that recorded the album A Dark Murmuration of Words in the absence of live touring during the Covid lockdown.