by Marvin J. Ward

Holyoke, MA, 4 November 2007.  For the 2nd concert of its 19th season, four instrumentalists from Arcadia Players roster joined forces with the vocal sextet Cantabile to present a recital of music by violinist and composer Salamone Rossi in the Italianate Music Room added in the early 20th-century to the late-19th-century Empire-style Skinner mansion, Wistariahurst, here.   The recital will be repeated in Deerfield, MA’s, Brick Church this afternoon.

This was the perfect setting for the music by this Jewish composer of Mantua, contemporary of Cremonan Claudio Monteverdi, and to a degree heir of Venetian Giovanni Gabrieli of the previous generation, and the musicians exploited the venue magnificently.  Rossi (ca. 1570-1630), who never left his native city, was, for a time, Monteverdi’s colleague, playing in his orchestra at the Court of the Gonzagas, Duke Vincenzo in particular, who died in 1612 (the same year as Gabrieli, whom Monteverdi succeeded at St. Mark’s the following year).  While his music shows the influence of both of these composers, it is also different from theirs.  He lived, as did all of his Jewish contemporaries, in the city’s ghetto, but he was reportedly exempted from the requirement of wearing the standard yellow badge.  He also had connections to the Jewish theatrical troupes, and his sister was a famous singer, known as Madame Europa for having performed that role.  She reportedly premièred Monteverdi’s Lamento d’Arianna.  They were perhaps the earliest prominent Jewish classical music performers in Europe.

The recital included selections from most of Rossi’s published works: a book of trio canzonets (1589), 6 books of madrigals for 2,  4, or 5 voices, the 1st to include printed basso continuo parts, 4 books of instrumental music, which include the earliest known examples of trio sonatas, a balletto for the sacred drama La Maddalena, and a book of polyphonic settings of various Hebrew texts entitled Ha-shirim asher l’Shlomo [The Songs of Solomon] (1623), although no texts from this book of the Bible are included, so its title is probably a play on his own name.  The singers, Dorie Goldman, Deanna Joseph, James Mead, David Olsson, Peter W. Shea, and Kayla Werlin, performed as a sextet, and in various combinations as duets, trios, and quartets, with some groups, or some members of a particular group, singing for dramatic effect from the small balcony above that was designed for musicians to use when playing for a ball.  Two different settings of the same text, Psalm 128, with two differently sized groups (sextet and trio) also offered an interesting compare and contrast experience.

They sang alternately a cappella, with Gregory Hayes’ harpsichord accompaniment, or accompanied by all four instrumentalists, violinists Robert Eisenstein and Joseph Jewett and viola da gamba player Laurie Rabut being added.  Sets of vocal works were judiciously interspersed with instrumental pieces: three sonatas and a group of three dances.  The entire cast was joined by two other singers, E. Wayne Abercrombie and Suzan Smith (spouses respectively of Werlin and Shea) for the double-choir “‘Haleluyah. ‘Ashrei ‘ish” [Praise the Lord. Blessed is the man] that made a quite spectacular finale in the context.  While the works selected were not performed in strict chronological order, their arrangement did provide not only a general overview of Rossi’s output, but also a sense of the composer’s development over time.

The constant variety in the performers’ forces and positions kept the audience’s rapt attention and helped it focus on the differences amongst the pieces, dating from 1589 to 1623, the period of transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque, that were all unavoidably similar in style.  They nonetheless possess charm, occasional humor, depth, and undeniable beauty, in addition to the historical uniqueness of the lovely Hebrew text settings.  Eisenstein gave an informative pre-concert talk, peppered with recorded samples of music by Monteverdi and Gabrieli, and provided work-specific comments throughout the recital.  The quality of the performance was uniformly high.  The whole made for a most satisfying and rewarding concert-going experience, although if the audience’s impulse to applaud after each piece had been channeled into following groupings of works, it would have been improved by curtailing the breaks of the spell.