Album Notes

Amorous, irreverent, solemn and devotional - the poems and music of the Jews of Renaissance Italy are transformed into a time capsule in sound.

Along with a love of entertainment and theater, the Jews of Rome, Florence, Venice and Mantua shared a lively view of religion, love, women, and the fragility of life.

This recording is an aural portrait of an era of unprecedented cultural exchange between Jews and their neighbors.

The music of Salamone Rossi and the poetry of Leone Modena, Joseph Tzarfati, Jacob Frances, Moshe ben Joab and Immanuel Frances are products of an Italian Jewish community hemmed in by discrimination and restrictive edicts, yet fully involved in the literary, musical, philosophical and scientific currents of the day.

Salamone Rossi, friend and colleague of Claudio Monteverdi, was the most important Jewish musician and composer of the Italian Renaissance.

His Sonatas and Sinfonie, Gagliarde and Brandi, as fresh today as they were four hundred years ago, are here paired for the first time with the beautiful and evocative words of his countrymen.

An observant Jew, he achieved prominence at the Mantuan court of Vincenzo Gonzaga and with the renowned Jewish theater in Mantua, the Universita Israelitica.

He published thirteen collections of secular and liturgical music, volumes which were widely distributed throughout Europe.

This disc features performances of his best known instrumental works, as well some which have never before been recorded.

Raymond P. Scheindlin, professor of Medieval Hebrew Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary, has contributed fresh and vivid English translations of some of the most colorful Hebrew poems from Renaissance Italy, a literary record previously known only to scholars of this period.

PERFORMERS: Mark Steinberg, Min-Young Kim, violins, Benjamin Wolff, violoncello, Dongsok Shin, harpsichord, Isaiah Sheffer, narrator.