George Frideric Handel was the it-boy of 18th-century England. His music spread across boundaries of genre and social class, making his operas, oratorios, and instrumental works wildly popular with the British masses. But Handel rose to fame atop the burgeoning British Empire, history's most influential global superpower, and in Georgian England, the same trading companies that underwrote arts and culture turned their profits from sinister activities: the trade of exotic goods and, most notably, enslaved people.

Through the lens of Handel's life and works, musician and storyteller Terrance McKnight (WQXR) leads an intimate and revealing journey about art, power, history, and family, weaving his own history as a young African-American man inspired by classical music with the story of Handel's world — and the money, power, and people that moved and were moved by it. Director Pat Eakin Young (La Celestina at The Met), conductor Malcolm Merriweather (The Ballad of the Brown King at The Met), and famed Handel scholar Ellen Harris complement a cast of star opera singers: soprano Latonia Moore, mezzo-soprano J'Nai Bridges, tenor Noah Stewart, and bass-baritone Davóne Tines.