Polly Sussex performs, teaches and researches Baroque Cello and Viola da Gamba music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She trained initially in traditional cello playing at the Akademie musickych umeni in Prague and in London at the Royal Academy of Music, then privately with William Pleeth . After obtaining her Ph. D in Music at the University of Otago, Polly performed freelance. In 2007 and 2008, Polly undertook further study in the Viol and Early Music  at the Hochschule fuer Kuenste, Bremen, North Germany and in Basel, Switzerland. She plays all sizes of Viol, including the tiny Pardessus, much loved by French ladies of the aristocracy before the French Revolution.

See Polly performing Marais with Santi Miron at Espai ku Gallery, Barcelona, July 2017 here. The new bass viol Polly plays was made by Francisco Pecchia, master viol maker, also of Barcelona. It is a copy of an anonymous seventeenth-century instrument in private possession.

Recently Polly Sussex and Sarah Watkins performed two beautiful and unusual works, written by composers born in the same year on opposite sides of the English Channel: the first cello sonata of English suffragette Ethel Smyth, and the only cello sonata by the French woman Mel. Bonis. The concert was part of the Heritage Concert Series at the Auckland Library. See their performance here.